John Conway's Game of Life | Jordan Ellenberg and Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Jordan Ellenberg: Math...
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GUEST BIO:
Jordan Ellenberg is a mathematician and author of Shape and How Not to Be Wrong.
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[@knarkknarkaren]

The one thing the game of life taught me is that reductionism doesn't work. Even if you manage to disentangle and model all the constituent parts fully, they can not tell you everything about the emergent behaviors and properties

[@gabrieldiaz-aylwin5453]

Really good insight!

[@johnhausmann2391]

I think the most amazing thing about the game of life is what it says about the attempt to reduce emergent features to rules that produce the features. It's almost the opposite of what Lex is talking about -- it's the question of the reverse direction of prediction that is interesting to me. For example, if you are observing a region of a grid, not knowing the rules, is it possible to determine the rules? What if the grid was so fine that you didn't even know a grid was there? Even if you did know the grid was there, and you were looking at a static feature? Maybe you conclude you are just looking at some static object, not a process . . . I just think it has profound and very humbling implications related whether/how science (me, a materialist) can reduce emergent properties to the process that produced them.

[@swig_gigolo]

I went down a rabbit hole of cellular automata on UA-cam as well Lex I also have blender

[@radwizard]

Reminds me of time crystals, where over time the geometric patterns emerge because of oscillations.

[@freedom_aint_free]

The Collatz conjecture is much simpler than game of life and still after 100 years or so nobody is able to predict its future, it just says that take a natural number "n" if its even, divide it by 2, if it is odd multiply it by 3 and add 1, the conjecture says that no matter in what number you start it will eventually always reaches 1 (some authors considers it the stopping criteria other sees it as a cycle so going back and forth to 1), and besides that, the sequence of natural number usually gets quite wild, it shoots up to pretty higher number and falls back to small numbers, and keeps doing it until it reaches 1.

[@francescospezzano4707]

Wonderful

[@imensonspionrona2117]

I always thought the Game of Life is fundamental piece of understanding on how microscopic organisms might behave (or play out) macroscopically.
In real life there are so many bizarre "final board configurations", that might only be rationalized by some game of life setup that went completely wrong. Gliders for example can be seen as what some might call "spiritual". Or a mechanism. Imagine gliders that act like white blood cells. I can.

[@CognosSquare]

Wolfram did a lot of deep observations about the pattern-categories of rules of the automata though.

[@cripylocdog]

What is the name of the game he recommended? I can’t find it..

[@11NK11]

I couldn’t find it either, but I found one I think might be similar ...
It’s called
Game of Life Cellular Automata

[@mazorsharp]

Golly, only on the iPad at the moment

[@GurtTarctor]

I recommend checking out Visions of Chaos, a program which contains all manner of interesting generative visualisations, and has a fairly comprehensive set of cellular automata rules to check out. The "Multiple Neighborhoods Cellular Automata" sets in particular exhibit some fascinating lifelike properties, there are some real standout gems if you keep searching.

[@BrandonJohnson-bx1ht]

It's just called "game of life".... there are so many different versions now that any kind of game that says something about "cellular automata" will get you there.

[@BrandonJohnson-bx1ht]

@@11NK11 that Is the game they're talking about

[@ogfish8031]

2:53 ….bul did not just say Lex grew up in the “Societ Union”

[@johnfitzgerald2339]

"Golly"? "GOLi"? "GOLee"?

[@johnfitzgerald2339]

Found it: "Golly - Andrew Trevorrow". iPad only.

[@John-ss4xj]

Could it be?

[@adamburling9551]

Who created the game of life though.

[@ionvasile12]

Mr. Fridman is not really familiar with Kurt Godel work!!

[@sealrk191]

69 like okaaaayyyy