Game of life conway circuit generator#

Dennett regards this as an accurate “toy model” of his view of the workings of the universe he claims that the relation of these complex two-dimensional dot patterns to the underlying simple rules is essentially the same as the relation of all processes in the universe, including human action, to the underlying mechanistic laws governing subatomic events.īill Gosper, the MIT professor, imagined a supercomputer dedicated to Life. There are no backdoors, no hidden variables everything is directly and completely visible.Īs we saw the evolution of simple patterns into the universal Turing machine, programmable computers, and digital clocks. Given the state description of this world at an instant, we can perfectly predict the future instants by the simple application of one law of physics. The entire physics of Game of Life is captured in this single rule. Under all other conditions the cell is OFF. If the answer is exactly three, the cell is ON in the next instant whatever its current state.

If the answer is exactly two, the cell stays in its present state (ON or OFF) in the next instant. Let’s combine the Game of Life rules into a single fundamental rule to make the point more dramatic.Įach cell, in order to determine what to do in the next instant, counts how many of its eight neighbors is ON at the present instant.

Game of life conway circuit generator#

It should be considered an essential tool in every thought-experimenter’s kit, a prodigiously versatile generator of philosophically important examples and thought experiments of admirable clarity and vividness.

In my opinion, every philosophy student should be held responsible for an intimate acquaintance with the Game of Life.