Cellular Automata

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed

I'm just ten minutes into this presentation, by an artist not a scientist, introducing cellular automata, and I felt I should share it here. I think @catalog especially will appreciate it.

I'm also gonna look for some software that lets you create your own parameters.

Something of a gnostic systems theory to be ascertained here, stigmergy, etc.

May even shed a light on theoretical physics, which seems to be Wolfram's angle.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I look at this, and I see us. I see ultra complex physical-unto-chemical-unto-biological systems that have had eons to stochastically iterate, perhaps even within deterministic parameters.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Cellular automata may be the leading example of an aesthetics of negentropy.
Actually maybe the leading example is the Mandelbrot set, which I still only have a thin understanding of.

mandelbrot.gif
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There was a bunch of stuff about this topic in the popular press when John Conway died a few years ago, I recall.

A cool thing about his Game Of Life is that you can use it to implement itself on a much bigger scale:


Which process can, I assume, be recursively iterated indefinitely.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I suppose viruses are a pretty good example of cellular automata, when you think about it.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
That accretor simulation is very similar in concept to a cellular embryology, cells being genetically programmed, as it were, to replicate and differentiate in certain ways. The environmental difference across cells, comparable to the different "neighborhoods" around cells in cellular automata, exerts influence over the nature of this differentiation.

This is what I meant when I said
I look at this, and I see us.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
This is quite a nice thing about the Turing completeness of GoL:



Which on one level is really cool, but also seems like it's a bit distinct from what makes them aesthetically interesting, which is the combination of emergent complexity and particularly, IMO, the chaotic nature of the complexity, with massive unpredictability in the scale of the patterns that will emerge from superficially similar starting points.
 
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