Are you here? We need your stimulating discussions. One I'm thinking about is why *emergence* is not well represented by the Game of Life. Or more precisely, it's only a slice of it, and not the most important one for biology/neuroscience. Will explain soon!
@PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust @manlius
I guess it's best to think of #emergence as an umbrella term for a set of concepts that at best have Wittgenstein-style family resemblances.
I agree that the Game of Life does not capture all aspects of emergence. But it does illustrate how unanticipated higher-order structures can arise and propagate.
@DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust @manlius
Yup, definitely polysemous. The question then is, do we attempt to find an underlying unifying analysis or to engineer an explication that best advances the field? I would vote for the latter
@dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust @manlius
Umbrella terms are fine, after all no one can really "own" a term. So clarity (to paraphrase @NicoleCRust) comes from making it clear what you mean. We all can do better in that respect!
And I also really like Game of Life type of examples. I was pretty stunned to find out (presumably) that it can be shown to be Turing complete (in some versions.).
@PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust actually you can do more: you can build a Turing machine using the Conway game of life!
This makes it a universal Turing machine!
It means that in principle you can use the GoL to design and compute the GoL itself. Mesmerizing.
@manlius @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust Now that’s a famous video! Brought back memories of my colleague at the Institute of Neuroinformatics back in Zurich, Matthew Cook, who among other contributions related to the #GameOfLife and #automata wrote this paper on “Still Life Theory” (2003), analysing means to end up with stationary objects, and devising switches and gates: http://vigeland.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/Warehouse/StillLifes/StillLifes.ps
(From mobile, open the postcript with e.g., the Dropbox app.)
@manlius @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust By the way the video that slowly zooms out from the low-level #GameOfLife to the higher-level one that the low-level implements is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
@manlius @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust Spectacular really.
Once I tried to explain what's happening in this video to my son with large Lego bricks made of small ones ... Similarly, the concepts of fractals or self-similarity are also hard to explain.
@albertcardona @manlius @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn
this conversation made me pull Gödel, Escher, Bach from my bookshelf. Thanks for the impulse.
@felix @manlius @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn Fun choice. The tortoise dialogues are quite something.
@albertcardona @PessoaBrain @dbarack @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust lovely, isn’t it?