Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Conway in 1970. The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. What I find soothing is how it provides an example of complexity arising from first principles. I think that might be the thing that blows my mind as a human more than anything. Everything that exists arises from a series of rules. There isn't any magic involved. it is interesting that you can know all the input parameters of a system, and not be able to predict the outcome.
The game is undecideable.You are not able to instantiate a specific grid and know for certain that a speific later pattern will occur. That being said, you can begin to understand certain features of the system.
Rules:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies (underpopulation)
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies (overpopulation)
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (reproduction)
There are fixed patterns and shapes that can also emerge from the game of life. When you run it, you will find the variious iterations of the shapes. Many times the shape gets locked into an oscillating pattern. Others will continue to evolve at random. It is also possible for a system to evolve in a chaotic fashion before eventually settling into a fixed oscillating pattern.
Another aspect of this that I find quite interesting is the difficulty in running the system backwards. If you were to take a final end state of the simulation (with an arbitrary pattern), it is intensely computationally expenseive to determine the actual starting configuration. The yt channel AlphaPhoenix> does an excellent job of looking into this and how the solution revolves around gradient descent and using SAT solvers. (Which are black magic in themselves. Computer proofs are a crazy concept I would like to learn more about...)
In general, I feel like this is just a beautiful example of the complexity of our world. It is a reminder that thing did not need to eveole the exact way that they did and we should appreciate the eauty of the world.