Digital astronomy with cellular automata
kylehovey.github.io
Digital astronomy with cellular automata
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#2This is very, very cool. The images of the game-space embeddings have so much interesting correlations that represent.... what? Who knows.
The four images at the bottom of the article, along with the first embedding image, strongly suggest that the game groupings are somehow lined up, with a single interrupted loop. Again, to the eye there are lots of correlations that imply categories and relationships. Would be fun to explore.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#3“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
— E. W. Dijkstra
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#4Thanks for this, it brings back memories. I did a similar search of rules way back when but much less systematic.
HighLife and Day and Night were two rules that I found and shared with a private mailing list that Conway was on. He was very complementary as I recall, I was elated.
Day and Night came from a deliberate search of the subset of rules that were self-inverse. For example the inverse of Life is a rule where the background is normally black and objects are white. But some rules have a symmetry where objects exist as well as their inverse.
Likewise HighLife came from a search of rules that supported the Life glider - there’s a subset of neighborhoods that aren’t involved in the glider evolution and can be set to other values. I noticed HighLife because it has a naturally occurring replicator, something very rare.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#5“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — E. W. Dijkstra
Astronomy actually is sort of about telescopes. Without telescopes, astronomy doesn't exist beyond some basic things. That's of course not true about computation, which is what I assume he meant by "computer science". Maybe a better analogy would have been astrophysics or cosmology.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#6This is going to take some time to digest, but this is very interesting.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#7Truly awesome work. There is a weird second-order kind of beauty here, in that the act of classifying and visualizing the surprisingly-complex emergent behavior of simple CAs is, itself, a meta simple-CA-like algorithm that has managed to produce an astonishingly beautiful and complex result. The fact that this structure is just kinda “baked into” the universe/math and produced basically ex nihilo is mind-blowing.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#8“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — E. W. Dijkstra
Astronomy actually is sort of about telescopes. Without telescopes, astronomy doesn't exist beyond some basic things. That's of course not true about computation, which is what I assume he meant by "computer science". Maybe a better analogy would have been astrophysics or cosmology.
The way I read this is that computers are a bit like telescopes, in that they allow us to appreciate the structure of the [logical] universe. These instruments sharpen our limited powers of observation, allowing us to see farther or more clearly than we would otherwise be able to do with merely pen and paper.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#9This was a great read. I love the idea of an ordering on CAs to complex systems with extra dispersion about the midsection to help explain things like stability.
Re: Digital astronomy with cellular automata
#10This is great! It would be very interesting to see this approach applied to continuous CA