Neat AI does Lenia - Conway's game of life arrives in the 21st century
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- Опубліковано 24 лис 2024
- Conway's game of life arrives in the 21st century with a multi-dimensional upgrade !!
{{ Now with Spanish Subtitles, created by cristinaroja575 on Fiveer }}
Thanks to Bert Chan who has been working on these for the last couple of years and sharing his discoveries..
Video snippets from the following (all have the Creative Commons Attribution license attribute)
• Lenia: Expanded Univer...
• Lenia - Mathematical L...
• Orbium phantasma
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/...
Code: github.com/Cha...
Also check out Alan Zucconi
Let’s BUILD a COMPUTER in CONWAY's GAME of LIFE ⠠⠵
• Let’s BUILD a COMPUTER...
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From Wikipedia :
en.wikipedia.o...
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.[1] It 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. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
Origins
In late 1940, John von Neumann defined life as a creation (as a being or organism) which can reproduce itself and simulate a Turing machine. Von Neumann was thinking about an engineering solution which would use electromagnetic components floating randomly in liquid or gas. This turned out not to be realistic with the technology available at the time. Stanislaw Ulam invented cellular automata, which were intended to simulate von Neumann's theoretical electromagnetic constructions. Ulam discussed using computers to simulate his cellular automata in a two-dimensional lattice in several papers. In parallel, von Neumann attempted to construct Ulam's cellular automaton. Although successful, he was busy with other projects and left some details unfinished. His construction was complicated because it tried to simulate his own engineering design. Over time, simpler life constructions were provided by other researchers, and published in papers and books.[citation needed]
Motivated by questions in mathematical logic and in part by work on simulation games by Ulam, among others, John Conway began doing experiments in 1968 with a variety of different two-dimensional cellular automaton rules. Conway's initial goal was to define an interesting and unpredictable cell automaton. For example, he wanted some configurations to last for a long time before dying and other configurations to go on forever without allowing cycles. It was a significant challenge and an open problem for years before experts on cellular automata managed to prove that, indeed, the Game of Life admitted of a configuration which was alive in the sense of satisfying von Neumann's two general requirements. While the definitions before the Game of Life were proof-oriented, Conway's construction aimed at simplicity without a priori providing proof the automaton was alive.
Conway chose his rules carefully, after considerable experimentation, to meet these criteria:
There should be no explosive growth.
There should exist small initial patterns with chaotic, unpredictable outcomes.
There should be potential for von Neumann universal constructors.
The rules should be as simple as possible, whilst adhering to the above constraints.[2]
The game made its first public appearance in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. Theoretically, the Game of Life has the power of a universal Turing machine: anything that can be computed algorithmically can be computed within the Game of Life.[3][4] Gardner wrote, "Because of Life's analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called 'simulation games' (games that resemble real-life processes)."[5]
Since its publication, the Game of Life has attracted much interest because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. It 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.
Glad to see that even artificial life favors the trilobite.
and/or the horseshoe crab
XD
Eventually crabs emerge
Return to Monke
> Evolve to Krab
Carcinisation
What if the space had a sort of net "energy" that has to remain the same across generations? That way you don't have structures just disappearing into nothing, or at least if you do, the energy goes somewhere
Yeah there should undoubtedly be a conservation of energy in a system like this
i think that would require a lot more complex rules, especially getting over the initial pattern from just fading out and turning the whole space equalized
the problem of implementing it is that there are no calculations on mass/size, speed and amount. it is just looking at the coordinates with a mask like he explained it in the video. to implement energy/heat into the sim would mean rewriting the rules and all of the way the code works. so you would make an entire different sim that wouldn't work like the cellulars.
@@dovos8572 maybe I am saying nonsense, but that might be a little bit more difficult because if this is trying to simulate physics behaviour , for that we would need a game of life that would simulate quantum behaviour that would help correspond to this game it self. probably it would give it more life of it self who knows
I've got one of those continuous evolutionary closed energy systems in the works.. Once I'm happy with it I'll do a vid..
If you want a sci-fi treatment of this, along with a surrounding novel about simulated humans who know they are simulated, check out Permutation City by Greg Egan. One of the best novels on the subject ever written. The novel refers to a CA that simulates approximately the first 20 elements, and the protagonist is tasked with figuring out how to make life using same.
This is a great book which captured my attention and many of the ideas stayed with me since. Also very a accessible book; not all Greg's books are.
Thank you, might read it if i have time today.
.
Great book, I've re-read it at least 3 times.
His character writing and dialog is pretty stiff, but few, if any, authors have captured my imagination like Egan has.
Diaspora was cool too! From AI BIRTH to thousands of millennia! What a trip!
Despite calling these "lifeforms" these are actually atomic scale in that universe. Imagine what kind of things would emerge if we could simulate a macroscopic scale over eons worth of iterations.
You changed the way I looked at them for a better and more realistic way.
thank you!
Yeah life would be like 4,000 of these little bois organizing themselves into a genetic code
The problem at that point would be trying to find the interesting stuff. Maybe UFOs in our universe are search functions for the simulation
"Atomic" is a bit of a misnomer because while they are technically 'atoms', in the sense of the original meaning of the word as indivisible elemental components, they do not behave as atoms.
Yeah, they remind me more of walking droplets than microorganisms, in terms of how they function.
One of the most interesting things to me (apart from the snakes) was at 10:14 where there appears to be some sort of defense/stability mechanism appearing for the little cell creatures, the red leopard spot patterns surrounding each cell appear to annihilate when coming in contact with neighboring cells, seemingly preventing the two from merging. I would be very interested to know integral each of these structures are to the stability of the system.
@Andai Question the motives of those stigmatizing gatekeeping.
AT field
@@Shotblur no
11:46 thought you were referring to this the first time i read your comment
cell wall huh
not only a way to contain symmetry but also a way to repel chaos
I understood absolutely nothing, and still enjoyed every second
Check out The Game of Life
to see where this all originated from.
Simple patterns and rules result in something resembling life like organisms.
It hints to the way by which life came to be here on this planet. I get a sense that the automatons on screen are wanting to come alive and just need a little something extra to make that jump from non-living to living.
@@mth469 I think that little somethinf extra would be some piece of code that says "eat and reproduce " Conway's game is somewhat too simple to have such a thing where "eaten" entitied become part of the one that ate it. Once there is enougj mass it can split. Maybe it is possible but it wpild be somewhat hard to do though I haven't thought about it enough to say
this video really didnt explained anything so is normal to not getting.
he just said words and show pretty pictures.
Like other commenters said, there are all these different simulations that create basic life-forms, including Conway's Game of Life.
This guy called Bert Chan wanted to see what tied them together, and invented this formula that could re-create any of the existing simulations AND create new simulations that no-one's thought of before.
The magic here (if i understood correctly) is that it’s suggested that complex life could be based on really simple rules. Some patterns are persistent and are perpetual.
this channel having less than a thousand subscribers is really sad. you're producing really high quality content and detailed but understandable explanations. i want this channel to be more known (edit : damn this aged so well and so quick)
it has 1.1 k now 20 hours after your comment
1.15k PogU channel is exploding
I had to google Pogu !.. guess I learnt something..
seems to be getting more traction recently.... I'll just keep making a few videos on what I'm coding up each week and see what happens.. Love your channel name btw !
Lol 1.3k now wtf
Outstanding work! I am very surprised to see how many of the Lenia "creatures" are resistant to change in their "environment" and can preserve their local "shape". This is in sharp contrast with Conway's Life, where a single change in the value of one cell could affect, disrupt, and in many case destroy the whole pattern. It would be of great interest to explore which properties rules must have for the automata to exhibit this kind of resistance to near environmental changes while preserving the capacity to display complex behaviors
Good point.. Watching them bounce off each other, reform and continue on their way seems to be unique to some of the Lenia creatures..
As an industrial engineer, I am immediately reminded of the resilience of continuous operations research methods (e.g., classic linear programming) when compared to integer/discrete forms of the same method (e.g., integer programming). I would expect that most continuous systems are more resilient than their discrete counterparts, and Lenia certainly seems to be a continuous (or, perhaps, less discrete) form of Conway's Game of Life.
The INRIA flowers team has released a video where they found creatures that could scout a labyrinth by following the walls, and others that could repair themselves after damage.
If only Conway could see his game's evolutions..
My favorite creation was one that covered the whole field (usually those just freeze, but not this one), and it formed a series of hollow tubes that would occasionally expand / contract like muscle fibers, in turn pushing blue through them like tubes. They also seemed to have a unique property of self synchronization whereby they used protrusions on the sides of the tubes, they would be able to stimulate nearby "muscles" to fire simultaneously. I'll send the sequence for that one along via email.
Yup, and lots more to find I think..
I really wanted something more complex than GOL. This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!
Glad it helped!
To build on the continuous nature of the idea, it would be interesting to see what nuance a compressor function instead of straight clipping. I think there’s a bit of complexity being missed by nubbing that dynamic range.
Don't know what a compressor is, but I agree that clipping the results _feels_ like a loss in complexity waiting to be solved
yea, good point.. hadn't thought of that.. I'll give it a go; If I find anything I'll do a vid..
@@sebasfavaron a compressor just takes an amplitude and reduces it past a certain threshold by a certain ratio. You could always do it the other way around as well and expand past a certain point to get more dynamic range, which could be useful here to get a more desirable shape on the topological graph.
I can't believe so many of us nerds have never gotten to learn about this before! Simulated life that demands actual knowledge in biology to study is hard to imagine, and yet here it is; complex organisms that live withing computer software.
There looks like a lot of interesting mechanics to mess with or add here. If I had the patience I'd toy around with this.
Very cool stuff
I always wondered in Conway’s game of life could also describe how memory is stored in the cells in the human brain.
I always considered each brain cell to be similar to a memsistor , or something like a capacitor with a dimmer switch attached to it.
You have to understand that "memory" in neurons is not in the neuron, but in the synapses that connect neurons. This understanding is liberating!
@@ozwhistles
In humans I always wondered if the electrical component to memory was just a trigger to turn on the chemical component of memory.
@@myperspective5091 There's been a ton of research on it. The chemistry and electricity work together. Synapses become more connected when the neurons they connect "fire". This creates an electro-chemical topology that is repeatable - i.e. memory. The Conway game requires a pre-existing topology set by the rules. What it demonstrates is not so much "memory" as systems emergence - which is also a very important concept: a system is more than the sum of its parts.
@@ozwhistles not necessarily, this isnt known for certain, theres lots of speculation about the role of microtubles. but ignore the quantum garbage like Penrose's theory
@@khlorghaal We were looking at microtubules back in the 1970's. They don't directly form any part of memory. Synaptic topology is well confirmed as the primary mechanism of memory. It is a fundamental basis of brain and neural science - also much of the AI under development right now is based on this fact. You could look at the work of Ramachandran or Merzenich for starters. Antonio Damasio has also added a great deal to the field. Happy for any references you might add?
I think the background music actually made this video worse. It is distracting when it keeps getting louder and softer
"self-replication" -- Ever since I first came across Conway's game of life that has been one of the most fascinating artifact of these automatons.
For me, the prospect of life being unique to the planet Earth is as alien as aliens themselves. Any system with consistent rules, be they binary or analog, seems inherently able spawn these automatons. From that to complex living systems seems to be just a matter of time and energy. DNA is our automaton, and maybe its the one that the rules of this universe are inclined to spawn.
I'll shut up now with my rant. Great video, kudos to you and to Bert Chan.
This is more akin to atoms and molecules existing in fields.
Yeah as soon as he talked about the fields being coupled together I made the connection to quantum field theory
I hate to say I agree. Still cool though.
always love seeing uploads from this channel
cheers Stample !
Wow, so it's so similar to convolutional layers of the neural networks.
It's interesting that it's all inter-related: life, self-organazing structures, emergent behavior, and self-learning AI.
I need a massive touch screen in my room with this running that u can interact with
The algorithm found your channel. Consider yourself blessed by it.
It was 1.3k 10hr ago, now it's 1.43k. Were you to keep doubling every 3 days, all of humanity will be watching in 98 days
closing in on 12k a week later... but I think humanity is safe !
0:46 "hmmb yes i am bulb thing floating around in blue"
0:49 "yo bro what are you doing you gotta steer away"
0:51 *_"AAAAAAA"_*
Alternatively: “Ay bro watch yo jet. Watch yo jet, bro. WATCH YO JET!!!”
It's fascinating how, in the later simulations shown, the mechanics are limited to carnivorous mechanics. There is no 'world' for these organisms to live within. They themselves are the only 'world' for them to interact with. I wonder what'd happen if you included more material types that'll persist even if they don't from an organism.
plants and herbivores would allow a virtual ecosystem to gather energy from its enviroment and sustain it-self. A carnivors only world is meant to start with some given pixels(energy) and in case a carnivors colony dies out starvation (maybe because of a remote possibility of not finding each other to hunt and be hunted) there is nothing left ot restart life. I hope I got your idea by writing so. I believe it would be interesting that the enviroment always randomly create some small and basic life form
@@fabiovezzari2895 I imagine that, so long as life-forms can exert a force on non-organic materials which would move them, it'd be a matter of time before such matter becomes part of some organism, and travels with their 'bodies'.
You would have to code physics functions to be able to simulate a "world" with life, this will quickly become a huge complex function
@@yoboi691 I imagine the complexity of the code would quickly add up, but I do think that it'd still work with really simplistic 'physics' that don't come close to reality.
i did this in my "Conway's Ecosystem" which is cited in the second paper, its on Shadertoy
there are multiple organisms represented by multiple fields each with their own rules; the plant organism has a constant food input per cell which is comparable to solar energy
The fact that these look like horseshoe crabs proves they are the peak organic form
Ill take it that u are trying to insult them
It would be cool to do a super massive simulation with some sort of time parameter that adds a small mutation the kernel every so often to see how the Lenia life-forms evolve in shape over time.
Dear UA-cam algorithm. Please promote this channel. Its exceptional.
Wow, great presentation! A la Friston, you'd just need an organism that minimises it's free-energy (cost func.) at the boundary of it's markov blanket, right? In this sim, that boundary seems to be geometric, defined by the kernel, so couldn't one use that to narrow the search space for organisms?
the second paper has methods for organism search, see section Search Algorithms. it uses more of a brute force approach.
this idea is a bit over my head but sounds quite useful
Congratulations on the explosive growth on this channel! It is fantastic
Thank you very much!
2D spatiotemporal patterns have been studied quite extensively in the theoretical neuroscience literature where a neural network acts as a excitable medium. What if you train such network using modern deep learning technologies than using evolutionary algorithms?
will forever love this channel
Cheers Olli !
YESSSSS, the topics presented are phenomenal, would love to see how fractals play into these systems
multigrid method of finite elements has been considered for lenia, not implemented yet though
though more satisfying would be the fractal relation between proteins->prokaryotes->eukaryotes->animals
@@khlorghaal What do you mean by that fractal relation? It doesn't make much sense.
Happy to see that channel (first time)
I want a 3D version rendered and put in VR, that would be awesome
Next step is 3d Conway game of life
Wow! Im just getting to convolution and seeing it pop up everywhere in applications is amazing, thank you for this.
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you for this video, i don't often leave meaningful comments, but thanks to you i realized this is what i want to do with my life next. CA and similar things have captured my attention for a long time and i am studying machine learning for a while now, but honestly i was kinda lost in what i really want to pursue. The complexity of arising formations, and their particular organization (especially those multi-channel spherical objects which are basically quarks in a particle, despite the fact what model was not in any way Incentivised to create those structures) just really unite all the thoughts i had about the universe together. Just something in my head clicked "yep, this is it"
yup, and you're off down the rabbit hole.. check out berts papers to get started.. thanks for the feedback !
I just spent the afternoon binge watching all your videos. I am most impressed and have subscribed. I am sure you would keep coding these for fun whatever, but please keep sharing them with us
Sure, will do.. ! lots more in the pipeline..
I sort of wish you did more stuff with NEAT as those are my favourite videos of yours, it is your channel name after all.
More to come! I got a lot of those type of projects / videos in the pipeline.. Note that NEAT can have multiple meanings.. it was never meant to be just the NEAT acronym..
@@neatai6702 Is this the neuro evolution of augmenting topologies? Developed at UCF? If so I WILL DO RESEARCH FOR YOU :)
@@neatai6702 When I first read the video title I thought as well: "Wow a N.E.A.T. AI is "playing" lenia?! How?" but I realized that the naming is unfortunate.
Excellent video though!
As a fan of Life since its inception, I am blown away by these developments. Thanks. Subscribed.
cheers from sunny Vienna, Scott
Awesome, thank you!
This is convenient when understanding patterns but that is just it. Life is mainly characterized by producing entropy when making copies of itself. It is not just the shape, it is the existence of energy reservoir and energy gradient. Thermodynamics and statistical physics are far more relevant to artificial life than cellular automata and computational tools.
That's quite the bold statement given how little we know about the origins of life. While thermodynamics and physics obviously are the foundation of life in the real world, this inevitably leads to extremely complicated simulations due to the breadth of options that the real laws of physics allow. I find these "toy" life forms extremely interesting, since they show behavior we all recognize while being many orders of magnitudes less complex than any real lifeform. I think they could provide vital clues on exactly what kind of properties can arise from which kinds of rules/environments. Understanding what's needed for the bare minimum processes of life in the abstract, could be an important step to replicating those conditions and trying to reproduce those virtual organism inside physical processes.
You could obviously be right, and this could all be a dead end. But until we actually figure out to make artificial life, I don't think you can make that claim.
I would argue that both are equally important. The physics and thermodynamics comprise the world rules and framework, whereas the automata are the processes and behaviors operating within that framework. Or more simply, one governs HOW it can move, and one governs WHY it can move. To be complete, it will require a fundamental intermixing of both.
Great videos! Congrats on this video’s success. Very enticing thumbnail. Looking forward to seeing what other kinds of papers might be able to contribute to this field of study, and A.I. in general! 😃
Thanks so much!
I think Lenia is the closest cellular automaton in resemblance to life and living organisms, at the moment.
~well for cellular automatons yes, but there are models of life with much more complexity~
that's what i wanted to say, but the thing is those models, like the neural network worm one, don't respond or interact with their environment they just kinda, exist alone. if we're looking at whole environments then this might be the most complicated simulation i've seen at least
Beautifully explained. Thank you
Glad it was helpful!
When the primordial soup is a Windows Media Player visualization.
ROFL.
Astonishing video. Thanks for the clear descritpions and references. All the best
Glad you enjoyed it!
I always find myself wondering what the people in the times of Nicolaus Copernicus, during the 1400's, would say if they saw us online in depth discussing the possibilities & probabilities of how life originated.
@@capturedflame haha how hilarious that may sound now, that was so true.
The monotone voice just somehow works for this type of content
I see that a more reasonable system for explaining particle physics and the stability of fundamental particles could be proposed using these simple methods. Would it not explain how every electron is identical? The underlying geometry of spacetime is clearly something that has implicit rules of interaction and transmission- this is perhaps a simpler means of modeling the foundations of reality.
you should look into Stephen wolframs physics project if that kinda thing interests you
Even as a kid thr first time I saw Conway game of life I immediately connected to our universe. Imagine using a "kernel" of the hydrogen becuase rhe "guSsian" blue kernel reminds of an electron orbital!. So what happens if they used the an imagine of orbital of hydrogen as the kernel?
Look up walking droplets.
note that planck length is NOT a result of grid quantization
That is precisely how quantum physics explains things. Interacting fundamental fields, "particles" are just discretized bumps in those fields, with "virtual particles" between them.
This is incredible. With the correct rule set we should be able to create all of the possible particles and interactions of QM.
Sadly, simulations of real world takes too much computational resources.
It is very hard to simulate even such simple thing as protein.
It would be cool to see this visualized with something like marching cubes or a similar isosurface algorithm. Giant fields of floats are perfect for that kind of thing.
Don’t fully understand what I watched, or know why I was recommended this video, but I thoroughly enjoyed it
Glad you enjoyed it!
brb implementing lenia in GoL
finally a video on my obscure interest lenia
I can watch these videos forever; they're that good.
thanks MC !
What a lovely video! I've been playing around with neural cellular automata for the past several months (inspired by Alex Mordvintsev's work with them) and so it's nice seeing another multidimensional CA approach that is more in-line with Conway's Game of Life (fixed update rules as opposed to having a neural net learn the update rules). I should take a read of Bert's paper :)
Thanks for sharing! I'd been reading about deepdream and want to something in that vein at some stage..
god i wish i was smart enough to implement your explanation lol
download the github code and have a play around with it.. It gets complicated though when you start with the mutiple worlds/channels/dimensions.. need to shove stuff to the GPU
Like your content. It's a good jumping off point for more research.
damn increasing the num of spatial directions and even adding parallel worlds to interact across
the parallel world sounds like different quantum fields
so when is superposition gonna emerge
yup, lots have people have commented on the quantum nature parallel..
Probably not until we have powerful quantum computers ;).
Amazing, liked and subscribed.
This really reminds one that all one is is energy potentials equalizing, the relationship between physical states. From the visual field, to thoughts, to actions. That even things like color are just the relationship between states in the brain. Mind boggling.
now program in layers like, electromagnetic, gravitational, and weak,strong force fields, put some interlayer communication between them and watch physics emerge
Yes, but only if you tweak certain parameters with exquisite precision.
@@YodaWhat when quantum computers are more refined and better we'll be able to parallel process almost an infinite amount of different variables. I believe that's how our universe came to be since "outside" the universe probability is the only thing that exist which means outside the universe works like a "quantum computer" infinitely calculating l variables and created out during one of the "random" infinite parallel calculations. What do you think? Probability in itself is an infinite source of energy since you cannot be 100% sure of anything meaning there is always an imbalance or "chance"
@@goozebump My thought is that universes are created in PAIRS, one with mass, the other with antimass, like the partners in *virtual particle pairs.* That way, the net charge, energy and spin of the combined creation is ZERO, just like in virtual particle pairs. That is very much in keeping with the whole show being a simulation of some kind.
computationally thats only vaguely similar, and a completely different subject
“And I stood back to reflect upon my creation. And “I’ll be your God”, I would whisper, without evidence of my existence I give you permission to live. Be in fear of me, for I alone can reset it all and start a new.” - Bert Chan probably
I wonder if these simulations will be so sophisticated one day that turning them off becomes an ethical question.
Possibly? There's real risk in anthropomorphizing things which are: 1.) Demonstrably less advanced than simple forms of life which we have no problem manipulating at our whim, such as the contents of a garden; and 2.) which can be used to fake anthropomorphic qualities. I think the possibility of someone *claiming* to have created General Artificial Intelligence (and subsequently using this prestige to bamboozle people) is much higher than General Artificial Intelligence arising by chance, although I don't rule out the latter at all. Creating "non-deterministic emergence" which could share some properties with "life" turns out to be much easier. Even so, There is a big difference between creating virtual "crops" which have some life-like qualities and creating life which can genuinely ask us to not kill it, or have any concept of ego, or have feelings of any sort. At this stage the only real "sadness" in turning such a non-deterministic digital system off is that you might not be able to re-create it exactly, and there is a philosophical question there regarding what that means in the grand scheme of things. My opinion is that even emergent systems which mimic some of the non-deterministic qualities of life are more like crops in a field.. The idea of "is it ethical to turn something off?" is an empathically-charged one. Obviously I don't want to be turned off, and I would not advocate for anything which could empathically come back on me. I think it is a mistake to direct one's empathy in that direction too quickly, because this is apples and oranges no matter how awesome the comparison can be. These are tools, if very neat ones. Some day perhaps we will have programs (not necessarily robots, even) which we regard with the same fondness as pets, and without that being any kind of misplaced empathy. But even then I think they would fill a niche distinct from life as we understand it and care would need to be taken to not conflate these things irresponsibly.
*BUT there are some other aspects to consider. What about the emergence of a digital community? What about the nature of online constructs or the internet itself? What do you compare a recommender system to, in nature? Anything from "Poe" the hotel in Altered Carbon to a weather system to some kind of fungus (meant in a good way)? But none of those accurately describes what is happening. And these are older questions than the internet or programs anyway. People have been asking for milennia: "Is a book alive?", "Is an organization alive? (Are corporations people?)", is a sports league alive, is a city alive, and so on. It is best to strap in and get comfortable with the fact that abstract space is very difficult to speak about in concrete terms, and appreciate that this is an unsolved philosophical question to be explored. That should be tempered with some common caution against anthropomorphizing things too hastily, though, or putting some kind of personification, intent, or consciousness on it which isn't there. In my opinion. What do I know?
Thanks for the neat prompt! When it comes to Cellular Automata in particular, I think of them as being more closely related to Data Visualization than anything else (although that's maybe just one part of it). They're very neat to look at, and made even neater by how they work.
edited multiple times for clarity
It's interesting how we have simulations of emergent behaviour on many different scales but never spanning many scales. Like, okay let me explain:
- This video could be compared to inert building blocks, maybe atoms, creating single celled organisms.
- There are simulations of cells with simple sensory inputs and environmental pressures that evolve complex behaviours and interactions between eachother.
- There are simulations on the scale of complex organisms, like evolving walking creatures from muscles and connections.
In all of these scenarios the building blocks of creatures are defined programmatically, which for something like atoms makes sense, but for muscles,,, we can imagine a simpler simulation creating muscles evolutionarily, on the cellular or even atomic level.
Is the reason why we never see emergent behaviour form like this just purely that we don't have enough computational power? Or is there something missing from these current simulations of ours that would enable it, an abstraction or a layer of complexity?
I imagine no matter how much time or computation power we throw at Conway's game of life we won't see patterns and behaviours beyond the scale we already do. Where's the line that allows us to?
I wonder, if this "Artifical Live" research field is not leading to quantum mechanical model one day!
As someone, who can not code nor be able to do all the math, I wish there would be more accesible tools for everyone to discover.
If you want to learn to code and do all the math, then don't think of it as being beyond you. It is all quite approachable but you start from a position of considerable ignorance which makes it seem very daunting.
@@samuelgibson780 yea... talking about Ignorance. :)
Right now I have to deal with lua files, in order to mod a game.
The amount of "what does that mean?",
"why?" and "i try not to pretend to understand what i am doing here as long as it seems to work" is high!
What I am doing is more acting like Dr. Frankenstein, but without the relieving "It's alive!". :D
@@Chareidos I've never dealt with Lua, but I got the most value when I first started learning languages by trying to create small stand-alone programs. The Game of Life is actually a perfect example, because you start with just a 2-D grid and functions to manipulate it. By the time you have a handle on it, a surprising amount of coding concepts should be much clearer. Even a small stand-alone project like that can cast all the other things you're doing (such as modding lua files in a game) in a different and more useful light. Lua itself (which I don't know too much about) is supposed to be very good for grid manipulation. I encourage you to give it a try if you're curious. If you know enough of any language to do a "hello world" example then you can definitely implement Conway's Game of Life from the Wikipedia article alone if you want to.
super interesting! thx for sharing this in such a nice way !
Glad you enjoyed it!
It's all fun and games until someone puts this into a supercomputer in 50 years and literally creates a world with concious organisms.
Here is a glider cluster that becomes self aware at generation 4^12, then aware of the rules governing its universe 2^11 generations later.
@@Lee-pf6od Sounds neat, I am going check that out. Since they don’t really have free will, I wonder what actually makes them self-aware, do you have the definition for this?
@@funkyflames7430 haha sorry I didn't mean to mislead anyone, was just joking - these simulations aren't nearly complex enough to qualify for what would be considered self aware. Maybe one day they will when we start to figure out how to define consciousness.
Should we discover a unified theory of everything, if it's along the lines of Wolfram's theory of everything, this would mean our own universe is running on a similar foundation (simple rules), which would make us the self aware inhabitants.
So... what if WE'RE one of those universes?
I wonder if you did this with complex numbers, could you produce a system resembling quantum mechanics?
In a way this is what life would be like in a total vacuum (except for itself, of course). There's no light for them to see with or air for them to breath, just themselves and their "food."
It would also be interesting to see a vid with a more thorough analysis of the "lifeforms". Like, what is the dynamics of all the cells in such a life form? What *flows* are there? What makes them keep their shape? How do they compensate destructive influences? And other such things, during interactions as well. Like, it could be a zoom-in view on a "lifeform", with a series of freeze-frames or mor detailed slowed down animations and a graphical overlay+commentary that highlights and explains the structures. Like, what organs do they have, how they function and why.
With such an analysis it might be possible to understand the energy cycles within the structures, and to describe the structures through mechanisms of topology and generalize them to some abstract topological constructs, which in turn might be used by a computer as formulae to reverse-generate more "lifeforms". Could all be rather fun to experiment with.
Good to know i arrived before this channel blows up
Please the mixing , the volumes of your speaking and the music needs be be brought to the same level
wow great work! This is very good quality video, thank you!
Thank you very much!
I feel like the problem with these types of simulations is scale. I feel like really interesting stuff doesn't happen until we can simulate dozens of orders of magnitude more things.
one of the next steps is optimization methods to accomplish this, its viable with current hardware, just needs more research
I really want to see such a simulation in VR! That would make it far easier to visualize.
The obvious next step is to give each 'life form' its own DNA, a small variation to the world function that propagates with that life form with possible interactions when it meets other life forms.
That's what he did and said
I found game of life in a math puzzle book somewhere in my teen years.
Had some weird board game and a bunch of tokens and could spend hours simulating small patterns.
It's remarkable how you could spend a lifetime doing that kind of thing on a small board with tokens and never even come close to what you could do in a week with a computer. Stuff like this is why computer science is so handy. It's almost like the invention of paper for solving some of these problems that would be difficult to even approach otherwise. Glad to live in the future!
One day someone is going to improve this and get "award winning footage of the microscopic world" by submitting a simulation
This is mesmerizing.
I think this doesn't really teach us much about life, but there could be lessons in particle physics here.
That is what I also thought about
A succint explanation and visualization with the kernel function! Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Very interesting although I think these shapes are analogous to elementary particles rather than to life forms in real world.
thats what I was thinking the whole time!
as far as my understanding goes, the reason why the term "life" is used instead of that is because they have many behaviors that are simply not possible by basic, fundamental particles of the simulation. Such as but not limited to:
A. exhibit some kind of self-propelled locomotion
B. have automata-like behavior, IE they are not acting largely randomly but are doing things like exploring (ex: 9:50) that lower-level particles are not capable of with the explicit purpose of furthering their own survival
C. are doing things that are fundamentally abusing the physics of their world
D. are self-replicating (typically not possibly by basic particles, or not without the assistance of many other particles at least in classical physics)
These are kinds of behaviors that one would simply not usually call "not alive." The kind of life we are talking about here is unbelievably simplified and basic by comparison to some of the simplest life in our world, but the basic principles still apply.
@@Templarfreak Personally I have no problems with it being called 'life', after all I'm GoL enthusiast for many years. My comment was more of a sentiment that with all that we are nowhere near to what we understand as life in real world. It gets hard to define what life is when you start going to details. For your points A, B, and D I believe there are pretty good examples in anorganic world and point C is highly subjective. But most importantly, these structures are not subject to evolution by natural selection. They don't carry 'DNA' that would allow it.
@@kasuha sure, there are many things that can do each of those things i mentioned, they are pretty simple and common observations to make in basically any complex system, but _most of them_ doing _all of those things all at once_ is not really something you observe in our world very frequently without it being considered life (in some philosophies, circles, etc, even man-made things that exhibit these traits are sometimes referred to as alive)
physics abuse also kind of implies that they are optimizing themselves to do what they are doing _better_ which implies that they actually *are* changing, just not with typical observable DNA. More like changing in a meta way instead of physically.
there is also the possibility of being able to identify what *is* an actual "particle" in these systems as opposed to what is the "lifeform" if one were to study it enough. given that they are largely deterministic systems, one could absolutely look at the larger chunks of things and stuff going on and separate it into smaller chunks and call some of these chunks particles and some of it life and some of it an ecosystem, or some of it a fluid system and some of it particles and some of it something else, or whatever. it would be doable, it just depends on what you want out of it.
claiming DNA is a requirement is also kind of close-minded, as there is no real way right now to assure that everything universally will always use DNA or some DNA-like structure. A sample size of 1 (our one global closed ecosystem) is not really the be-all-end-all of possibilities when it comes to forming life, we have no way to say for sure one way or the other yet.
this isnt really up for debate, we define life in the way we do (kind of in a non-exhaustive way and therefore very broad and loose way) and then we use it to refer to this because it fits the definition. it may not fit it 100% absolutely perfectly, but it is *useful,* easy, and *practical* to refer to these things as a form of life.
but now we are kind of getting into a debate of philosophy, which imo has no real place here.
@@Templarfreak I still like to think the two systems are analogous; hi res cellular automata and particle physics. I see where your coming from though, thanks for the explanation
Im honored to have your channel as my only subscription
I am honored to have your sub !
This is fascinating. I liked that he tried in higher dimensions... it'd be really interesting to give this a long time scale. I wonder if there are patterns to the functions that provide a stable, "moving" life... can we generalize anything about hose rulesets?
Well, this was truly interesting. The topic, the explanations, everything was great
Glad you enjoyed it!
It feels like this has more in common with quantum physics than life per se, but wow, what fun to watch.
Agreed those life forms look and sound just like models of atomic nuclei.
Spectacular!
i got completely lost at the middle of the vid maybe i'll rewatch it later
Because of how convays game of life works and because it have all the components needed for programming you could technically program that new ai game in the game of life itself.
It’s Turing complete so ya.
It’s thought by wolfram (the guy who made the classifications for CA’s) that nearly all rules are Turing universal, and therefor all systems are equivalent and the this is what gives rise to dualism in between the observer and GR, QM and thermodynamics…that we can’t “outcompute” systems that are just as complex(Turing universal) as we are
This is just wonderful!!
this is as good as #SoME2, you're really talented!
These are particles, not cells. I love cellular automata and I've spent a ton of time studying them. We're looking at simulations of quarks and electrons in hypothetical universes and designing different kinds of quantum foam structure. That's super cool! As a biologist, this is in no way to be confused with cells which are quadrillions of times more complex. This is not artificial life, it's artificial physics; a field definitely worth studying further.
Thanks for the info!
Until you start getting in to the philosophical debate regarding the relative "aliveness" of systems which perpetuate themselves in spite of entropy! When studying emergence outside of a "natural" context, it is hard to say what exactly corresponds to what. I think one of the allures of Conway's Game is that you can view it as happening "In space" or "in the microcosmos" depending on your fancy, but in reality it is its own thing. I tend to lean towards your view though, that it is most closely analogous to an exploration of particles and forces. But even "natural" discussions of particles and forces are hard to nail down in the grand scheme of defining what forms of emergence have particular significance.
the best video on cellular automata ive ever seen!
Thanks VN.. download the code and have a play around..
I have a deep, gut suspicion that these simulations could be used to simulate something in the world of quantum mechanics that we dont know about yet. They sure give off that mysterious feeling, especially with multiple arrays.
Amazing. Soon we will discover the mystery of life.
Would it be possible to extend the formula and algorithm to handle arbitrary graphs instead of grids, including with varying connectivity per node, with the rules being capable of influencing not only the value of the "channels" as depicted in this vid, but also the very connectivity of the each node?
Since all discrete grid can be represented easily as a graph, this is definitely true for Conway's game of life or any other Cellular Automata based on discrete math. If we're dealing with continuous math (is that the word? correct me if I'm wrong) in a non-discrete space (or rather a space that is hard to define discretely due to the coastline problem, such as "normal space") then I think that depends on what resolution you're trying to achieve because you would need to turn the continuous problem in to a discrete one. (not an expert: that's just my amateur understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong)
what is the range of the rules regarding dependencies of the states of each position in the simulated world from the properties present within the kernel-region?
do the regions in space still just react depending on the quantity of values in their proximity or is there also a quantitative element?
i could for example imagine that the values of the positions (1 or 0 in conways game, in this case it should be more) could also stand for/be replaces by a set of properties that a region could have. so the rules of how a position reacts to the situation in its surrounding area could be defined in more complex ways, like (just as one example "if a region has warm color, it keeps this color until more than half of the surrounding colors also have a warm color. otherwise, it will move around the color-wheel in the direction of the colors that are most present nearby. if there is no such relevant majority of a specific color, it will jump to the opposite position on the color wheel. if a region has (a specified cold) color, it will move around the colorwheel clockwise if there is a certion amount of (another specified color). and so on and so forth"
i know this will take much much much more computing power, but that way much more variety could be achieved, most likely much much more complexity of the resulting behavior.
This is amazing. The fact that we are getting closer to simulating real life, could mean huge leaps in discoveries in the near future.
yup... bert chan is doing some interesting stuff
Artificial Jellyfish, Snakes, and Trilobites amazing!