I’ve been doing some reading on proto-computing, such as Turing Machines and such, and came across this fascinating exercise which involves computing, evolutionary simulation, fractal geometry, etc. – it’s called Conway’s Game of Life, invented in the 70s, and involves a set of rules that govern the existence of individual pixels. The rules are balanced carefully so that certain patterns sustain themselves. Some can move across the screen, and some can even generate “children” which also move. A whole vocabulary has been built up around these patterns, and the Game of Life can be used to construct a Universal Turing Machine, capable of calculating any algorithmically-based problem. The patterns are also beautiful.

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See Also: Spore!,Promotional T-shirts in Virtual Worlds,Virtual Economies,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Warren on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.