Game of Life

I am fascinated by the idea of John Conway’s Game of Life. Also fascinating is the term used to describe it – “a zero-player game”. I guess all of us are familiar with zero-player games -  at least those who have built a house with packs of playing cards, stepped back a few feet and have rolled a marble at its foundation to see how it goes crashing down; or those who arranged a long trail of matchboxes and toppled one to set the tumbling in motion (like the dominoes in V for Vendetta). There is some kind of godliness in doing an initial set-up of a system, in kicking it off and in sitting and watching how it pans out.

Conway’s Game of Life is a system with simple rules  -

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations. (Extract from the Wikipedia article)

We can understand that, when the above simple rules are applied on a particular seed or inital arrangement, complex patterns start to evolve. Interestingly, on the flip side, a very complex inital arrangement when processed by these rules might destroy itself completely. The Game of Life, initally of academic interest alone became popular after an article on it by Martin Gardner in Scietific American. Numerous complex intial patterns were found by academicians and hobbyists. Some of the examples are - still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, methusalahs, guns, puffer trains, rakes and breeders. (Golly is a tool to see these beautiful patterns in action. It comes with a huge set of complex initial states).

There exist patterns that resemble finite-state machines. This means that the GoL system is Turing-complete, meaning that it is capable of performing any computation that could be performed by a modern computer. (I do not have a clear understanding of finite-state machines or turing machines. Need to delve deeper).

What I find the most facinating with these cellular automata is the amount of time and effort researchers, and more surprisingly, hobbyists put on their research. I sometimes wonder what they get out of it. What beauty do they see in delving deep into such an artifical world and in coming up with patterns? There could possibly be no other explanation than curiosity.

An Interesting Reverse-Analogy

The Game of Life is analogous to life. Generations and civilizations are spawned and after a span of time, destroyed. Though GoL emulates life, I wonder if the reverse is possible? Can human life be lived based on extremely simple rules followed religiously?

I sometimes think that God has to put his head through the skies and scream "STOP!" so that the whole of humanity freezes. He then gives them a command - a simple rule to follow and then snaps them out of the freeze. From then on, humanity functions, robotic it may seem, based on that command and everyone leads a life devoid of the problems before the divine interference.

I wonder what that command would be?

I've always wanted to experiment free will. Suppose we are all told - "You can do anything as long as you cannot prevent others from doing anything they want", and if we all were to follow it religiously, how will the world turn out? Will there be utopia or dystopia?

On first thought, I see this brings more happiness. With the rule firmly etched into all of us, there will be no oppression or tyranny. All such explicit methods of curtailing free-will will be eradicated. What would remain are the implicit modes of curtailing free-will. Most of humanity is bound to one or many of these entities - their community, religion, caste, social class or to their family. Very few have complete individual free-will to make their own decisions. Expectations and demands from family members, and family responsibilites play an important role in everyone's decision-making and at times take people far away from their individual dreams. If all such entities (family, social class, religion etc) advocate free-will, then I guess we'd definitely see happier people around.

(At times, I am skeptic about this experiment. I just wish I could try it out! Note to self: Time to work on the Zombie-iser)