Cellular Automata Quotes

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

It is perhaps a little humbling to discover that we as humans are in effect computationally no more capable than cellular automata with very simple rules. But the Principle of Computational Equivalence also implies that the same is ultimately true of our whole universe. So while science has often made it seem that we as humans are somehow insignificant compared to the universe, the Principle of Computational Equivalence now shows that in a certain sense we are at the same level as it is. For the principle implies that what goes on inside us can ultimately achieve just the same level of computational sophistication as our whole universe.

Everything is cellular. Reality is cellular. I really love that word, cellular. Cellular phone, cellular foam, sleeper cell, cellulite, cellular automata . . . A cell can be anything! . . . It's cellular. It's quantum dots. It's quantum and cellular and bosonic. It's bosonic cellular quantum dottiness. With ribbons on." -- Jimmy Ganzer, 'Good Night, Moon

This is perhaps ZZT’s most impressive quality: its ability to transform, to become anything other than Town of ZZT. In 2009 Drake Wilson released Preposterous Machines, a collection of machines built out of massive systems of Objects interacting—often by way of shooting. Bullets were transmitted from Object to Object like electrical impulses. What are the machines? A sinewave grapher. A calculator. A machine that solves the Towers of Hanoi. A Mandlebrot visualizer. An implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, the famously complex cellular automata that springs from a set of four rules.

But there’s something potentially confusing about all of this. In the past there were plenty of tasks—including writing essays—that we’ve assumed were somehow “fundamentally too hard” for computers. And now that we see them done by the likes of ChatGPT we tend to suddenly think that computers must have become vastly more powerful—in particular surpassing things they were already basically able to do (like progressively computing the behavior of computational systems like cellular automata). But this isn’t the right conclusion to draw. Computationally irreducible processes are still computationally irreducible, and are still fundamentally hard for computers—even if computers can readily compute their individual steps. And instead what we should conclude is that tasks—like writing essays—that we humans could do, but we didn’t think computers could do, are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought. In other words, the reason a neural net can be successful in writing an essay is because writing an essay turns out to be a “computationally shallower” problem than we thought. And in a sense this takes us closer to “having a theory” of how we humans manage to do things like writing essays, or in general deal with language.

In outline, it is easy to see how a spatial game could work along the same lines as the cellular automata. The game players are arranged on a chessboardlike array (it can be in three dimensions, of course, or even more). During each round, the player on a given square plays the game with its neighbors. After this, each square is occupied by its original owner or by one of the eight neighbors, depending on who won that round—in other words, who got the biggest payoff.

I asked him how he thought to bring together his ideas on computation, self-replicating machines, and cellular automata with his newfound interest in the brain and the mechanism of thought, and his reply has lingered with me for decades, and still comes back to haunt me whenever some casual occurrence brings his detested name to memory. “Cavemen created the gods,” he said. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.

cellular automata.