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It appears that you are tacitly presuming that life typically co-evolves with a stellar system and that implicitly, life of earth complexity took a maximum of ~4.5b years to evolve(?). If this is case I'm curious what your thoughts on the recent paper by Sharov and Gordon might be. The paper applies statistical arguments to genomic complexity of earth organisms and argues that life as we know it on earth may in fact have taken as much as 9+/-2.5bn years to evolve (predating earth and the local star, potentially up to approximately the entire history of our galaxy and a significant percentage of the history of the stellar epoch)?
If life of complexity similar to that currently on Earth does take as much as 11.5 billion years to evolve, that does not leave a very large window for forerunner biologies and would tend to increase the probability that Earth life is in fact some of the most complex life to ever even have the opportunity to arise in our current light cone.
Is the position of their paper (basically: that life takes longer to evolve than we think) something you are already planning to address further in your article series? I'd be interested to hear what your interpretation might be.
forgive me if I misunderstand you, but you seem to be implying that, on two separate occasions, two different people were (induced to?) lie about the outcome of an experiment.
So you're implying that either Eliezer is dishonest, or both of his opponents were dishonest on his behalf. And you find this more likely than an actual AI win in the game?
Eliezer Yudkowsky has been let out as the AI at least twice[1][2] but both tests were precommitted to secrecy.
I'd be surprised if he's the only one who has ever won as the AI, I think it more likely that this is a visibility issue (e.g. despite him being a very-high profile person in the AI safety memetic culture, you weren't aware that Eliezer had won as the AI when you made your comment) and while I'm not aware of others who have won as the AI, I would place my bet on that being merely a lack of knowledge on my part, and not because no one else actually has.
this is further compounded by the fact that some (many?) games are conducted under a pre-commitment to secrecy, and the results that get the most discussion (and therefore, most visibility) are the ones with full transcripts for third-parties to pick through.
In general it seems that gatekeepers who win are more willing to release the transcripts.
It's also possible that the 'best' AI players are the ones most willing to pre-commit to not releasing transcripts, as not having your decisions (or the discussions that led to them) go public helps eliminate that particular disincentive to releasing the AI from the box.
This is of course, the same Prince Rupert for whom the Prince Rupert's Drop is named. Although this is ostensibly because he was the man who demonstrated it to the Crown, I always found some amount of schadenfreude in the fact that the man was known for cavalry charges that went too far and shattered his line as well as the enemy's.
I interpreted the question to include mobile devices and answered Tetris with high confidence.
It would be interesting to see the results of the question if we accepted either Tetris or Minecraft as the correct answer, since both are correct depending on whether or not "computer" was meant to mean "IBM PC Compatible" or "video game playing platform"
Wouldn't it be more accurate to state that R represents an enduring multi-system technological civilization and not mere colonial presence?
I don't think we can arguably claim that space in our stellar neighborhood has never been colonized, just that it does not appear to be currently