Conway’s Game of Life

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A very early example of a virtual mathematical sporder is Conway’s Game of Life (follow this link to read the fascinating Wikipedia entry.)

Gospers glider gun

The game demonstrates the emergence of complex phenomena (including self-replication) from agents following very simple rules. It was simply a grid, with pixels that followed a few rules based on the presence or absence of adjacent pixels. The “player” simply sets up the initial arrangement of pixels and lets the game work itself out.

It was of interest to scientists in several fields, especially to evolutionary biologists, as it beautifully demonstrates the principle of emergent order.

You can even play it online.

  • cole Terlesky

    I lost a couple of hours playing this the first time I cam across it online. Its also probably the most basic example of a sporder I can think of.

  • Gregory Koch

    Two problems with this as an argument to support atheistic evolution (I will explain just what I mean by this a little while later). First, when you start with a blank screen (no life) you will invariably end up with a blank screen forever. However, an interesting angle on this problem is that there does exist a case, which some feel is trivial, which I will soon explain isn’t, which allows for life to create where there is none. If you set the parameters so that a cell touching all dead cells lives, and a cell touching all living cells dies (or various similar versions) you can get a constant oscillation between full life and full no-life. But, what if the cells don’t represent organisms, but civilizations? It could show evolutionary bursts an later human societal change. That’s an interesting thought.

    The other pressing problem is we can see how parameters allow for live to spontaneously generate. But who sets the parameters to begin with? I would argue that in the Conway’s Game of Life Universe, Conway is “God”. Which brings me to the issue of atheistic evolution vs. religious evolution. I can’t deny the scientific fact of evolution. Some may try to, but I cannot. But at the same time, what made those random mutations occur that foster evolution? Some sudden mutations would be virtually impossible to change at once, such as the millions of changes required to change over from prokaryote to eukaryote. Additionally, there are a great number of parameters in our universe, which if slightly varied, would make life in the universe, or even the existence of the universe itself as we know it today, impossible. So yes, there can be parameters which exist to support this life, but then how do those parameters get set? I remember in 8th grade Earth Science class, we were talking about how water is the only chemical substance less dense in its solid than liquid form. The teacher asked us why that is, then when nobody got it, said it was because that way, ice floats on water, and if that didn’t happen, life in the water could never have gotten past winter because the waters would be permanently frozen, thus instantly killing all early life forever. However, as I pointed out, that still doesn’t explain WHY water behaves that way (and in fact, there is no known unique chemical property that causes this). It just explains why it is SIGNIFICANT. After we discussed this for a couple minutes, the teacher said it was a fascinating discussion but this is the answer we need to know for the Regents and if I wanted to worry more about it I should become a philosopher. (In those precise words). I could name hundreds of examples like that, where a certain parameter causes life/the universe as we know it to exist.

    On a side note, just because evolution is true does not mean creationism (in some form) is not. Due to relativity, the days may have been literal days (or at least period of constant length) from an observer in a fixed point in time. However, from the perspective of the universe, which moves through time, the length of these days are not fixed. Without going too much into the science of it (there’s info out there) suppose that we were to hypotheticallly define the beginning of each “day” as occuring when a beacon locked in time and space at the moment of creation emited a light pulse on fixerd intervals, one at the start of the first day (the moment of creation), one at the start of Day 2, etc. (I know this does not conform with the story of creation, we just need a way to define the precise start of each day, and this works.) To an observer fixed at the moment of creation, these pulses would appear to be released once every day (which is not a literal 24 hour day necessarily, but is a constant length). But to someone in the universe as it was progressing, the time it takes for them to take to arrive would be halved each day. The rough age of our universe is 15.7 billion years old, so doing some math, day 1 lasted 8 billion years (from our perspective), day 2 was 4 billion years, day 3 was 2 billion years, day 4 was 1 billion years, day 5 was 0.5 billion years, day 6 was 0.25 billion years, and day 7 was 0.125 billion years. Now, go into your Bibles, and look up what happened on each “day”. Now, go look up when those events took place in the history of the Universe. It’s so close, it’s scary. (On a side note, this theory had led to some debate about whether the 7th day (“God rested/ceased”) has actually occurred yet, and if not what it will bring. Some have said it will be the Second Coming/Coming of the Messiah, while others say it’s the apocalypse. Some simply say it will be a major global change, just as all other new days were, and we do not know what it will be yet. (The last one is occasionally combined with 2012 theories to further specify that the 7th Day will begin on December 21, 2012. This is certainly with the margin of error, as are about 150 million years).

  • Gregory Koch

    Full disclosure re my last comment: I am Jewish, not Christian. Also, the light pulse theorem is taken from another Jewish website. I knew I read it somewhere but I couldn’t recall where at the time. But now I have found the link. It is http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html

    On a side note, Jews are just as capable as being creation-nuts as Christians are. A religious community in Toronto boycotted a Jewish regallia store because it sold yamulkes with Barney the Dinosaur on it. They said dinosaurs never existed, so it was insulting to the religion. You know what? THERE WERE NO SINGING PURPLE DINOSAURS!!!!!!! BARNEY IS AN INNOCENT CHILDREN’S SYMBOL, NOT A REAL DINOSAUR!. (nor is he even supposed to be real on the show, though it took me the first 16 years of my life to realize that) And notice how they don’t mention the fact that they were also selling Cookie Monster yamulkes. There were never such creatures as cookie monsters, were there?

  • http://ryansafner.com Ryan Safner

    Thanks for your comments, Gregory, but (and I can only speak for myself): Nobody was making any claims for or against “atheistic evolution” here. This was just an instance of a virtual game exhibiting complex patterns from a simple set of rules. You assume this post proves too much – it says nothing about the origins of life as we know it.

    Religious controversies are not something we aimed to provoke here. Though we can discuss the origins of life and evolution elsewhere if need be.

    • Gregory Koch

      Ryan,
      Sorry. I wasn’t attempting to read something else into it. Keep in mind, I’m willing to guess most readers of this blog did not know what Conway’s Game of Life was prior to reading this blog. I, having heard of it prior to reading this post, happen to know the point Conway was making when he created it, namely that it is possible for all life in the universe to have evolved from simple to complex by what this blog refers to as “spontaneous order”. I assumed you were just presenting a simplified argument so that those of us who aren’t as familiar with Conway could still understand what you were saying. However, I was wrong for assuming that simply because you mentioned CGOL here, you agreed with the entire point it was trying to make. Now that I have read other posts and know more about this blog, I can understand that you weren’t making any points about evolution specifically, simply about spontaneous order, which is essentially what Conway was referring to, albeit not under that name. But this was the first post I read on your site. That wasn’t as clear to me then.

      -Gregory