Peter de Blanc

The article Games with Graphs said

I think that Life is much more physics-like than Go. Given any state in Life, the rules uniquely specify which state comes next. The rules of Go do not specify, even stochastically, how to obtain the next situation from the current situation – it all depends on the actions of the two entities called players, which are not specified by the rules of Go. Life has been proven Turing complete. That means, among other things, that you can build a mind in it. The thoughts and actions of that mind would be completely determined by the initial state and the rules of the game. No such feat is possible in Go.
 
Another difference is that Go has a goal and Life does not. Does physics have a goal – an objective morality that exists independently of any beings that live in the universe?

Peter de Blanc was the author of this article and is a young Bayesian from Philadelphia who studies mathematics and artificial intelligence. He has been thinking about existential risk for several years, and in 2003 he encountered the work of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). In the near future, he will be working with SIAI to develop a theory of goal systems for self-improving optimization processes. He is currently working on a graph perception system.
 
Peter earned a BS in Mathematics from Temple University and received the Copple Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2006.
 
Peter runs the weblog Space and Games.