Michael Levin

Machines don't do that.

Even this minimal thing has a minimal kind of intrinsic motivation, which is something that

is not forbidden by the algorithm, but isn't prescribed by the algorithm either.

And I think that's an important third thing besides chance and necessity.

Something else that's fun about this is when you think about intrinsic motivations, think about a child.

If you make him sit in math class all day, you're never going to know what the other intrinsic motivations are that he might be doing, right?

Who knows what else he might be interested in.

So I wanted to ask this question.

If we let off the pressure on the sorting, what would happen?

Now, that's hard because if you mess with the algorithm, now it's no longer the same algorithm.

So you don't want to do that.

So we did something that I think was kind of clever.

We allowed repeat digits.

So if you allow repeat digits in your array...

You can still have all the fives can still be after all the fours and after all the sixes, but you can keep them as clustered as you want.

So this thing at the end where they have to get declustered in order for the sorting to happen, we thought maybe we could let off the pressure a little bit.

If you do that, all you do is allow some extra repeat digits.

The clustering gets bigger.

It will cluster as much as you let it.

The clustering is what it wants to do.