Synopsis: This is an article from ‘The Guardian’ which using youtube videos gives an introduction to the mathematical recreation and its astounding patterns. The article ends with a video interview with the creator John Conway explaining his thought process when designing the rules.
In short Conway states that the beauty of Life is that it stands to reason that since you couldn’t predict what could happen ever, it is safe to say that anything can happen.
Questions:
- After reading The Crucial Experiment the value of this universe is a bit more apparent but still I have to question, what truly is its purpose?
- Conway stated that the Game of Life came about from a desire to solve the challenge of creating a machine capable of building itself, while I don’t fully understand how Life solves this, it comes into question… can this be considered a rudimentary version of machine learning?
- If there are rules but the patterns are unpredictable what do the rules prove?
- It almost works like some sort of negative induction or null hypothesis
- A follow up to the previous question would be are there finite sets of rules that don’t develop into a regulated pattern?