this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The beautiful idea that blows my mind, is how much better the comment section for a question like this post presents is on Lemmy, than Reddit!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=IK7nBOLYzdE

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

You can design and order custom genes online to make e-coli do different things.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it's all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:

  • Chaos theory
  • Higher dimensions (>4)
  • The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
  • The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just look up "The Game of Life." It's not really a spread sheet, that's simply how it's displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.

Heres another one. Michael behe's mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.

Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.

The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.

But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can't exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.

This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.

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