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Android App on Play Store - developed in 2014 and 10+ years as Android app with Javascript, rewriten in Svelte
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Custom rule sets, common patterns, and color mixing to produce artistic fades
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Automated mode - randomize rule set changes & patterns and watch life unfold...
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Johnston, Nathaniel, and Greene, Dave (2022). "Conway's Game of Life". https://conwaylife.com/book/#rle_files
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Bradbury, Phillip (2012). "Life in life". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
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Wolfram, Stephen (2020). "Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #89" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA
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Wolfram, Stephen (2013). "Talking about the Computational Future at SXSW 2013", https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/03/talking-about-the-computational-future-at-sxsw-2013/
By the way, it’s bizarre how few people work on this. Because I’m sure that, just like cloning, there’s just going to be a wacky procedure that makes it possible—and once we know it, we’re just going to be able to do it quite routinely, and it’s going to be societally very important. But in the end, we want to solve the problem of keeping all the complexity that is a human running indefinitely. There are some fascinating basic science problems here. Connected to concepts like computational irreducibility, and a bit to the traditional halting problem. But I have no doubt that eventually it’ll be solved, and we’ll achieve effective human immortality. And when that happens I expect it’ll be the single biggest discontinuity in human history.
Cellular automata
You know, as one thinks about such things, one can’t help wondering about the general future of the human condition. And here’s something someone like me definitely thinks about. I’m spending my life trying to automate things. Trying to make it possible to do automatically with computation things that humans used to have to do themselves.
Now, if we look at the arc of human history, the biggest systematic change through time is the arrival of more and more technology, and the automation of more and more kinds of tasks. So here’s a question: what if we succeed in automating everything? What will happen then? What will the humans do? There’s an ultimate—almost philosophical—version of this question. And there’s also a practical next-few-decades version.
Let’s start with the ultimate version. As we go on and build more and more technology, what will the end point be? We might assume that we could somehow go on forever, achieving more and more. But the Principle of Computational Equivalence tells us that we cannot. One we have reached a certain level, everything is already in a sense possible. And even though our current engineering has not yet reached this point, the Principle of Computational Equivalence also tells us that this maximal level of computational sophistication is not particularly rare. Indeed it happens in many places in the physical world, as well as in systems like simple cellular automata.
Cellular automata
And it’s not too hard to see that as we improve our technology, getting down to the smallest scales, and removing everything that seems redundant, that we might wind up with something that looks just like a physical process that already happens in nature. So does this mean that in the ultimate future, with all that great automation and technology, all we’ll achieve is just to produce something that’s indistinguishable from zillions of things that already exist in nature?
Wolfram, Stephen (2013). "Talking about the Computational Future at SXSW 2013", https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/03/talking-about-the-computational-future-at-sxsw-2013/