You may have heard of Conway's
Game of Life, where pixels "live" or "die" based on a few simple rules about how many neighbors they have. But did you know that in the 30 years since the game was created, Life enthusiasts have (created? discovered?) an extensive
catalog of (
objects? creatures?) which interact to form some
amazing,
nifty,
grinning, sometimes
beautiful,
rube-
goldberg, occasionally even a little
scary patterns often starting from the
simplest of
building blocks? (Including a
Turing machine!) Or that a
lone pixel can exert
remarkable control over its environment? Now you can see in a few seconds in a
java applet, on your
desktop, or even on a PalmOS
handheld the outcome of simple patterns that, when first discovered, no computer could handle. A mind blowing example of the power of
emergent properties.
posted by straight
on May 29, 2002 -
22 comments
