| Conway's game of life and the lessons learned [message #262] |
Thu, 01 October 2009 11:08 |
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 Matthew
Messages: 24
Registered: April 2007 |
Junior Member |
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I love Conways Game of Life. For those uninitiated into the world of cellula automata heres a good place to start and here is a great applet to paly with this trivially simple universe.
Go and explore. Do it now. I'll wait for you.
Back again. How long has it been, 5 minutes, five hours. Did you find it absolutely fascinating how 4 simple rules and a random seed pattern can produce such intricate complexity.
Can you see and play with life and not realise that the bare assertion that complexity can only come from a designer is simple argument from ignorance. Now you've experienced it for yourself you know first hand how simplicity
Ah yes says the theist, but the rules were carefully selected by an intelligent designer. Actually no. Sure this is one of the prettiest and simplest examples but there's so many other sets of rules for cellular automata and complexity from simplicity happens in a good deal of them.
This stuff blew my mind when I was 11 and first programmed it in Basic, it blows my mind still to know that turing machines have been built using patterns in Conway's Life. That if AI is possible on a Turing Machine then there could be a conciousness living inside this deterministic universe and try to imgine from the point of view of that mind, if it matters if the data in which it exists is being processed on one computer or another or even if it's being processed at all.
If our universe is simply a pattern existing within the solutions of analagous rules, does it acutally matter if some one or somethign external is solving those equations for us are are we self perpetuating?
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible"
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