11/23/2023 0 Comments Conway game of life driftThey can occur, but not frequently, and they tend to be very complex.Ģ. Structures that stably spawn other shapes are rare. I think there are two main problems with the game of Life:ġ. As I understand it, evolution is inherently irreversible (well, obviously not at the level of atomic interactions, but evolution operates at a much, much higher level). Hmm, I’m rather skeptical that reversibility is important for life-like dynamics. Musings along these lines make me more sympathetic to the idea that we’re all living in a computer simulation. (Best of all if you could update the lattice in ways that depended on the states of the cells, so that matter would be affecting the geometry.) Then you’d essentially be doing automata in the presence of gravity, since the “spacetime” on which the dynamics occurred would be flexible. While we’re at it, we could imagine automata on random lattices that evolved (randomly!) with time. If the nodes were connected to a random number of neighbors, you would at least avoid the rigid forty-five-degree-ness of the original Life, but it might be harder to think of interesting evolution rules. While I’m giving away all my wonderful ideas, it might be fun to look at cellular automata on random lattices rather than strict rectilinear grids. Don’t know if anyone has attempted anything like that (or whether it would turn out to be interesting). To really model actual biology, you would want an automaton that was fundamentally reversible, but in which the system you cared about was coupled to a “low entropy” environment. There are some reversible automata, which are quite interesting. (There are many initial states that evolve to a completely empty grid, for example.) As a result, evolution is not ergodic, exploring a large section of the possible state space instead, it settles down to some smaller region and stays there. My uninformed suspicion is that this is partly due to the fact that cellular automata typically feature irreversible dynamics you can’t recover the past state from the present. Conway’s original game supports an impressive variety of structures, but it’s not really robust if you start with a random configuration, chances are good that it will settle down to something boring before too long. While SmoothLife is undeniably more lifelike in appearance, I think the differences between these kinds of simulations and biological life are as important as the similarities.
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