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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

It's not often that I find a post that, after reading it, I have absolutely no understanding of what I just read.

Usually I have at least some very basic knowledge of the topic at hand.

I guess I should start by reading up on Conway's Game of Life...

Conway's Game of Life is probably interesting to most people here because it's a programming / mathy thing. And it's very worth exploring that angle.

However it's also worth noting what it is in far more general terms. It's a system with very simple rules (only 4) that can produce very complex looking behavior. And then you could ask yourself where else you might find similar systems.

The highly influential composer Steve Reich experimented with this idea in some of his earlist compositions. "It's Gonna Rain" was simply two tape recorders "perfectly" synced to play the same recorded loop. Of course they fell out of time and the resulting piece is pretty complex when you consider the source system is so simple.

Brian Eno in turn was influenced by this, is also a fan of Life, and has used and spoken often about very simple musical systems that produce very complex sounds or songs.

The idea in general is more far reaching than one might guess by looking at the game, and is worth becoming familiar with.

Quantifying the complexity of the GoL ruleset is slightly more complicated than enumerating the rules, I would imagine.

Certainly more complicated, but we do know the answer. It's Turing-complete.

http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

Isn't that the same as the point I was making? Systems with extremely simply rules can be complex. Am I missing something subtler that you're trying to say? A child can understand the rules of GoL and "play" it with pencil and paper. That's what is simple about it. The resulting behavior of the system is complex.

Rutherford Chang made a composition of 100 White Albums played at once!

https://gizmodo.com/listen-to-100-white-albums-played-at-onc...

Very cool. What was very surprising to me though was just how little the resulting complexity changes when you increase the source complexity from 2 sources (Reich) to 100 sources. And Reich was just a voice. Not an entire band. Although I think all these experiments are interesting, I am most fascinated by the simplest systems that result in the most complex behavior.

You might enjoy reading Glory Season by David Brin. It's a scifi novel with pirates and a competitive version of Conway's Game of Life- it's not central to the plot, but I've forgotten the plot and still remember Life. I read it several years ago and it piqued my interest the way Brin describes the time spent searching for new patterns.

It won't help you understand the mathematics of the game, but it might help you appreciate the beauty.

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