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| moana (profile) wrote, on 5-8-2005 at 7:57am | |
| Current mood: geeky Music: Catdog Subject: If only more people knew... |
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John Horton Conway is the creator of the Game of Life, based on the idea of John von Neumann, a mathematician who developed theories about both natural and artificial self-operating systems - automata. In 1940, von Neumann speculated on a universal constructor, a machine that could reproduce itself in ever-changing patterns consisting of cells in a grid. When a specific rule is applied to these cells, they begin to copy themselves. As the replications began to itneract with neighbouring cells, their bahviour changed and caused the entire gird's pattern to change every generation. Conway simplified this idea using a set of rules that limited the number of ways a given cell would behave from generation to generation. Cells could be turned on, off or stay the same, depending on the number of neighbours that were on. The goal was to create patterns that wouldn't die out too soon or grow too quickly. The game became famous in 1970 after Conway's idea was written up in an article in Scientific American, partly because it could be used as an interesting programming project. The Game of Life would be responsible for making cellular automata an exciting new field of mathematical research. Today, researchers apply many of the mechanisms of cellular automata to biological phenomena, creating a new field called Artifical Life a.k.a. ALife. Studies of patterns derived from John von Neumann's theories can be applied to traffic pattern analysis, human disease research and the creation of life-like machines. http://www.whimsey.com/Life.html Thus far, I have found seven static colonies that do not change throughout infinite generations. These colonies of cells are called "perfect colonies". Theoritically, if humans can find a way to live in a similar manner, they will achieve a perfect stalemate of reproduction and death, offering ideal circumstances to live in. The populations of such colonies vary from three cells to eight. Edit: Make it eight perfect colonies. |
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ac | 05-08-05 3:05pm and what do you think would happen if more people knew? |
moana | Re:, 05-09-05 4:17am absolutely nothing. it's sarcasm. you should know me well enough by now to know that pretty much 90% of the things i say are sarcastic. |
ac | Re: Re:, 05-09-05 10:35am No, not really...
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moana | Re: Re: Re:, 05-09-05 10:59am Aww. Well aren't you just the most beautiful little thing! |
ac | Re: Re: Re: Re:, 05-09-05 11:06am Nope. |