Research Philosophy
Q: If you're trying to understand life, why aren't you researching biology or chemistry?
A: Imagine you're a young grad student in the 90s hoping to contribute to our understanding of intelligence. Would you choose to study neuroscience given what we know today? It seems obvious that you would have learned a lot more about intelligence by learning to code and studying AI!
That's why I believe that the best way to answer What is Life? is to learn to code and simulate digital creatures all day. Programming lets you run tens or hundreds of experiments a day, while in a wet lab it takes on the order of days or even weeks to run a single experiment. Plus, I already learned how to code during my time researching AI and building a startup.
Q: How do you choose what to work on?
A: I treat research as an extension of learning. I just do what I did in high school to learn math, but now I'm learning things nobody knows about yet. Honestly, the hardest part is distinguishing between what's already well known, what's known but not well understood, and what's an open problem. When learning you can assume everything is well known, but research is a lot more complicated (e.g. what is entropy?).
When I saw ALife simulations for the first time, I didn't understand what I was looking at, so I read some papers and ran some experiments. The experiments left me confused, so I kept playing around until I could explain what was going on. That's how I wrote my first paper while on hiatus from my startup. After that, I still couldn't explain everything, so I wrote some equations and did some more experiments. That's how I made my second major discovery, etc...
Q: Are you going to grad school?
A: IDK, I probably should, but only under the right advisor. Greatly appreciate any recommendations!