I know about it, I’ve seen videos of it, but I have no idea how it works, or why it’s important. I mainly don’t get why it’s become to infamous.
In: Mathematics
I’ll spell it out real simple:
Conways game of life is a simple universe simulation. One we can perform in our universe.
It is 2d, matter either exists or not and time is atomic. There are some rules that govern the matter appearing or disappearing. That’s it.
And what you see when you start spamming random cells to ON is that stable structured can exist. Moving structures too. Patterns that self replicate. It becomes Turing complete like Minecraft red stone. You can build a computer in Conways GOL.
Which means if the GOL is big enough and you shake it enough some THING could conceivably appear. A self replicating pattern that grows and makes new patterns. Maybe randomly modified itself. It would be HUGE and take FOREVER but it would be like a simple bacterium from our world.
Conways game of life shows the possibility that the simple building blocks of physics rules *could* mean that abiogenesis was possible in our universe and happened.
It also posits that our universe could be a simulation in some other higher dimensional universe.
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