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The Patterns of Barricelli (2024)
I've been obsessed recently with the work of Nils Aall Barricelli who pioneered cellular automata 15 years before John Conway, artificial life 20 years before Christopher Langton and chaos theory 15 years before Benoit Mandelbrot. Barricelli called his creation "symbioorganisms", but it's interesting to try to demystify them without any analogies with living organisms.
One interesting claim Barricelli makes(pg 2): a pattern that reproduces itself tends to also propagate the environment that it arose in. I know physicists run large simulations of the early universe on supercomputers, which generate plausible compositions of elements over time as supernovas occur. I also vaguely remember from TV programs long ago that we've tried to run simulations of earth's primordial soup using best guesses of its early composition.
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