Synopsis: This reading was an except from Stephen Wolfram’s The Crucial Experiment – A New Kind of Science. The except looked at cellular automata* and asked the question “Can Complexity come from Simplicity?”
Questions:
- My biggest question for this reading was, why is this information useful?
- What is the different between one dimensional (Game of Life) and two dimensional (cellular automata)?
- Why the fundamental idea that nature works like these complex automata in that it all stems from simple beginnings, how can actual rules and examples help us better understand nature.
- How are these autonomous agents programmed (purpose of the lab I assume)
- Does a step refer to a change in a cell or a change in a row.
Notes:
- Cellular Automata is easy to follow since their behaviour must have the ability to be readily presented in a visual way.
- Fractal Patterns are the perfect balance between complexity and simple repetition
- The basic phenomenon is ultimately responsible for most of the complexity in nature
- Even though cells follow the same rules, different configurations of cells will have different behaviour
Thoughts on Lab:
- Physical computation behaves similarly to cellular automation
- executing few simple instructions in large numbers generating complexity
- however this is just one aspect of computation
- understanding how to generate autonomous agents on through cellular automata, we can apply skills to creating autonomous robots which is basically the foundation of nature’s complexity
* Cellular Automata is a collection of “coloured” cells on a grid of specified shape that evolves through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states of the neighbouring cells. Rules are then applied iteratively for as many steps as desired.