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Sad to see no mention of the fact that we have built computers in Game of Life, including one that can play tetris: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...
The video at the top of the article seems to be a depiction of a computer made in Life that encodes Life.
Melanie Mitchell’s comment, early in the article, mentions that fact that you are sad to see no mention of.
There is one mention of it in one of the quotes.
> Melanie Mitchell — Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute
Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible
Satisfying to see Kjetil Golid’s work mentioned — one of my favorite artists!
Yes, great stuff - his own site has some works you can tinker with, too[1], along with links to the source[2].
1: https://generated.space/sketch/ornament/ 2: https://github.com/kgolid/ornament
Thank you for linking this, super cool. His piece on Byrne's Euclid is amazing: https://generated.space/sketch/byrne-proofs/
Fun debate: Does "Conways Game of Life" constitute a universe? If so, do those forms within it have life?
It's hard to make structures in CGoL that are robust to collisions. So if you randomly initialised the universe I suspect you would never get life, because any complex structure that did arise would crash into random junk and be destroyed as soon as it tried to move.
If all nodes had a 1:1,000,000,000 chance to randomly flip every tick, then resilient structures would probably arise eventually, given a very large (or infinite) board.