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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I find there's something fundamental about small sized demos. Trying to craft something as diverse as possible with as few symbols as possible means you have to encode chaos and order at the same time.

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Procedural generation of interesting output being created by very small bits of code makes me think very profound thoughts about how life "works". Physics provides the virtual machine that life executes within, and tiny machines interpreting the "instruction set" of a genetic code are just generating procedural output.

If you're interested in the implications of this view, Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) has a book called A New Kind of Science[0] that explores how the complexity of the universe can arise from simple machines following simple rules.

[0] https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html

Wolfram is discussing cellular automata in that book, though I haven't read it so I can't provide anything beyond noting the mathematical field he's covering.

Ulam and von Neumann developed the concept of cellular automata working together at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Conway's Game of Life is a somewhat interesting 2d implementation.

Great recommendation!

Wolfram's work with cellular automata is definitely interesting, and I really "A New Kind of Science". (Edit: I must also concede that I agree with the review "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" cited by another comment here. Wolfram is a good read and a lot of fun, but I question the "science" in the book.)

I haven't re-read it recently to see how it holds up, but Steven Levy's "Artificial Life" (https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...) hooked me as a kid and set a direction for my future thought. It's not a technical book (which was frustrating to a 14 y/o kid with a programming background that wanted to see the technical details), but I think it would be very thought-provoking for someone new to the idea.

google for schabanel, rondelez, woods. They've been implementing gliders through DNA tiles. Quite something.

See also, this classic review: "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity"

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

(originally at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/)

I only made it half way through that book. I kept waiting for his "new kind of science", but there wasn't any science at all. It was just (paraphrasing): "hey! look at this cool automaton! ... and this one! this one too!". I like automata just fine, but that book was a huge disappointment. If he ever gets to the "new" part or the "science" part, please let me know and on what page.

a review at http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/ANKOS/Ankos.html

> Physics provides the virtual machine

"Very clever, young man, but it's virtual machines all the way down!"

Since we're talking about it :

https://pages.lip6.fr/vvm/publications/0008SBAC.pdf

https://pages.lip6.fr/vvm/publications/

courtesy of folliot and piumarta

What you describe can be formalized through the notion of Kolmogorov complexity [1], which relates to all sorts of interesting and fundamental concepts like entropy and uncomputability. So I think you're absolutely right to call it fundamental!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

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