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Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
Stephen Wolfram investigates the discovery of structures since the Game of Life was invented--searching possibilities versus invention by explicit effort. A thorough look at oscillators, modularity, glider guns.
An important methodology has revolved around so-called “ hasslers ”, which in effect allow one to “mine” small pieces of computational irreducibility, by providing “harnesses” that “rein in” behavior, typically returning patterns to their original states after they’ve done what one wants them to do. In a typical case, a search might consist of starting, say, from a trillion randomly chosen initial conditions (or “ soups ”), identifying new structures that emerge, then seeing whether these act, for example, as oscillators. When somehow my long-time interest in “ alien engineering ”, combined with my recent results about biological evolution coalesced into a feeling that it was time to finally figure out what we could learn from all that effort that’s been put into the Game of Life.
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