SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Gottfried Leibniz — who died 300 years ago this November — worked on many things. But a theme that recurred throughout his life was the goal of turning human law into an exercise in computation. Of course, as we know, he didn't succeed. But three centuries later, I think we're finally ready to give it a serious try again. And I think it's a really important thing to do — not only because it'll enable all sorts of new societal opportunities and structures, but also because I think it's likely to be critical to the future of our civilization in its interaction with artificial intelligence.

Human law, almost by definition, dates from the very beginning of civilization — and undoubtedly it's the first system of rules that humans ever systematically defined. Presumably it was a model for the axiomatic structure of mathematics as defined by the likes of Euclid. And when science came along, "natural laws" (as their name suggests) were at first viewed as conceptually similar to human laws, except that they were supposed to define constraints for the universe (or God), rather than for humans.

What's your favorite law, written as code?

Original Submission