We are joined by Cristopher Moore, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute with a diverse background in physics, computer science, and machine learning.
The conversation begins with Cristopher, who calls himself a "frog" explaining that he prefers to dive deep into specific, concrete problems rather than taking a high-level "bird's-eye view".
They explore why current AI models, like transformers, are so surprisingly effective. Cristopher argues it's because the real world isn't random; it's full of rich structures, patterns, and hierarchies that these models can learn to exploit, even if we don't fully understand how.
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***
Cristopher Moore:
https://sites.santafe.edu/~moore/
TOC:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:05 - Meet Christopher Moore: A Frog in the World of Science
00:05:14 - The Limits of Transformers and Real-World Data
00:11:19 - Intelligence as Creative Problem-Solving
00:23:30 - Grounding, Meaning, and Shared Reality
00:31:09 - The Nature of Creativity and Aesthetics
00:44:31 - Computational Irreducibility and Universality
00:53:06 - Turing Completeness, Recursion, and Intelligence
01:11:26 - The Universe Through a Computational Lens
01:26:45 - Algorithmic Justice and the Need for Transparency
TRANSCRIPT: https://app.rescript.info/public/share/VRe2uQSvKZOm0oIBoDsrNwt46OMCqRnShVnUF3qyoFk
Filmed at DISI (Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute)
https://disi.org/
REFS:
The Nature of computation [Chris Moore]
https://nature-of-computation.org/
Birds and Frogs [Freeman Dyson]
https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf
Replica Theory [Parisi et al]
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2722
Janossy pooling [Fabian Fuchs]
https://fabianfuchsml.github.io/equilibriumaggregation/
Cracking the cryptic [YT channel]
https://www.youtube.com/c/CrackingTheCryptic
Sudoko Bench [Sakana]
https://sakana.ai/sudoku-bench/
Fractured entangled representations “phylogenetic locking in comment” [Kumar/Stanley]
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11581 (see our shows on this)
The War Against Cliché: [Martin Amis]
https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Cliche-Reviews-1971-2000/dp/0375727167
Rule 110 (CA)
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule150.html
Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata [Matt Cooke]
https://wpmedia.wolfram.com/sites/13/2018/02/15-1-1.pdf
Small Semi-Weakly Universal Turing Machines [Damien Woods]
https://tilde.ini.uzh.ch/users/tneary/public_html/WoodsNeary-FI09.pdf
COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE [Turing, 1950]
https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
Comment on Space Time as a causal set [Moore, 88]
https://sites.santafe.edu/~moore/comment.pdf
Recursion Theory on the Reals and Continuous-time Computation [Moore, 96]
