Cellular Automata

[Clinamenic]

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]

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]

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

Or maybe origins of life (OOL) biology, with amino acids aggregating stochastically into polypeptides, eventually even nucleotides and then RNA.

 

[Clinamenic]

Cellular automata may be the leading example of an aesthetics of negentropy.

 

[Clinamenic]

Here is a web app:

utomata.net

utomata.net

and the GitHub

GitHub - soogbet/utomata: A javascript/webGL framework for cellular automata experiments

A javascript/webGL framework for cellular automata experiments - soogbet/utomata

github.com

 

[Clinamenic]

I think Minecraft uses cellular automata to generate unique worlds, but I could be wrong. Anyway, you can glean how that would work from this video:

 

[Clinamenic]

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.

 

[Clinamenic]

Of course 3Blue1Brown has an excellent video lesson on the Mandelbrot set

 

[catalog]

Looks cool, I'll check it.

 

[Mr. Tea]

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.

 

[Clinamenic]

Fractal cellular automata, incredible.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Apparently it was only last year that he died - got the 'rona. Or it got him, rather.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I suppose viruses are a pretty good example of cellular automata, when you think about it.

 

[Clinamenic]

Viruses, and actual cells too. The environment of a cell influencing its replication, etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

I.e. certain compounds intervening in gene expression pathways.

 

[Clinamenic]

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]

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.

 

[catalog]

Game of life is mentioned by alan Moore a lot and is also sort of like a Psychogeography thing cos of doing rules based derives

 

[Mr. Tea]

Cellular automata that are literally cellular:

‘Amazing science’: researchers find xenobots can give rise to offspring

Xenobots are synthetic lifeforms made by cells from frog embryos and assembling them into clusters

www.theguardian.com

 

[yyaldrin]

that's horrifying