Conway game of life
The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves, or, for advanced players, by creating patterns with particular properties.-Wikipedia
Since its publication, Conway's Game of Life has attracted much interest, because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. Scholars in various fields, such as computer science, physics, biology, biochemistry, economics, mathematics, philosophy, and generative sciences have made use of the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of the game's simple rules.[citation needed] The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that design and organization can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. -Wikipedia
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I was recently reading about artificial life and came across the statement, "Conway’s Game of Life demonstrates enough complexity to be classified as a universal machine." I only had a rough understanding of what a universal machine is, and Wikipedia only brought me as close to understanding as Wikipedia ever does. I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this very sexy statement?
Conway's Game of Life seems, to me, to be a lovely distraction with some tremendous implications: I can't make the leap between that and calculator? Is that even the leap that I should be making?-stackoverflow
A:"You can build a Turing machine out of Conway's life - although it would be pretty horrendous.
The key is in gliders (and related patterns) - these move (slowly) along the playing field, so can represent streams of bits (the presence of a glider for a 1 and the absence for a 0). Other patterns can be built to take in two streams of gliders (at right angles) and emit another stream of bits corresponding to the AND/OR/etc of the original two streams.
EDIT: There's more on this on the LogiCell web site."-stackoverflow
If digital physics is true there exist representions for our universe within game of life patterns.
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