intelligent design
Out of context: Reply #209
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- deep_throat0
"artificial life models are often intended to generate wholly new—and typically extremely simple—instances of lifelike phenomena. The simplest example of such a system is the so-called Game of Life devised by the British mathematician John Conway in the 1960s before the field of artificial life was conceived. Conway was trying to create a simple system that could generate complex self-organized structures.
The Game of Life is a two-state, two-dimensional cellular automaton. It takes place on a rectangular grid of cells, similar to a huge checkerboard. Time advances step by step. A cell's state at a given time is determined by the states of its eight neighboring cells according to the following simple "birth-death" rule: a "dead" cell becomes "alive" if and only if exactly three neighbors were just "alive," and a "living" cell "dies" if and only if fewer than two, or more than three, neighbors were just "alive." When all of the cells in the system are simultaneously updated again and again, a rich variety of complicated behavior is created and a complex zoo of dynamic structures can be identified and classified (blinkers, gliders, glider guns, logic switching circuits, etc.). It is even possible to construct a universal Turing machine in the Game of Life, by cunningly arranging the initial configuration of living cells. In such constructions, gliders perform a role of passing signals. Analyzing the computational potential of cellular automata on the basis of glider interactions has become a major direction in research. Like living systems, Conway's Game of Life exhibits a vivid hierarchy of dynamical self-organized structures."