Higher thoughts

Moved to higher thoughts yesterday by being reminded about cellular automata, in particular about the way that you can generate very complicated behaviour out of very simple rules, in a visually appealing framework. One example being the game of life, invented at about the time I was an undergraduate, but which I thought was little more than a toy. Nothing very higher about it at all.

Now of course I know better, having just read a little about it in a very fat book written by Stephen Wolfram (see reference 1), whom I suspect of having made a lot more money out of being a mathematician than John Conway (illustrated), the chap who invented the game in the first place. So I now know, for example, that the game of life has the power of Turing machine and can compute anything that one of those can - which is to say, a great deal.

Musing further this morning, I suppose that Mandelbrot sets are another example of the same thing - fairly simple rules generating pictures of breathtaking complexity. And then, there are all the elementary mathematical structures like natural numbers and groups, mostly capable of great complexity from great simplicity.

All this complexity and structure emerging, as it were, from thin air. An act of primal creation, not needing any human creative input at all.

I dare say there is a philosophical point lurking here somewhere, but I suspect that a drop of something alcoholic is needed to bring it to the surface.

From where I associate to the thought that I vaguely recall there being something you can pour on the ground to bring the worms to the surface. Clearly time to move on.

Reference 1: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/.

Reference 2: for pictures of cellular automata, goto https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cellular+automata and ask for images.