I spent way too many hours simulating ants (among other creatures) during Covid lockdown:<p><a href="https://intothethicket.com/" rel="nofollow">https://intothethicket.com/</a><p>Latest version:
<a href="https://into-the-thicket.s3.amazonaws.com/versions/0.2.7.1+-+stream/index.html?seed=247453a9297dd583bd2b14ca7528d6e39df623eb" rel="nofollow">https://into-the-thicket.s3.amazonaws.com/versions/0.2.7.1+-...</a>
There's a variant of Conway's Game of Life called Wireworld which is turing complete. The idea is that there is a "signal" traveling along a wire. You can try it here, try programming a calculator if you have a lot of hours to spare: <a href="https://xalava.github.io/WireWorld/" rel="nofollow">https://xalava.github.io/WireWorld/</a><p>Back in the day Golly was the best software for playing around with Game of Life variants, might still be true: <a href="http://golly.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://golly.sourceforge.net/</a>
Anyone interested in this should also check out Rudy Rucker & John Walker’s work on cellular automata [1]. These guys were obsessed with ants, hence ‘fourmi’ labs, fourmi meaning ‘ant’ in French.<p>Both of these guys have done incredible things. Rucker wrote the Ware tetralogy and Walker owned/engineered AutoCAD.<p>Rucker also wrote ‘The Hacker and the Ants’ where the protagonist (basically Rudy himself) takes on a virus which manifests as a virtual ant. Really quirky story, well worth reading.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/</a>
Many years ago I took (oddly) a physics class called (iirc) "Self Organisation" while doing a year abroad in Germany. Despite being a quite small class, it really inspired me from the perspective of self organizing systems.<p>I find structures like conways game of life, or slime mold or sand dunes to be fascinating for this reason. That from unit simplicity can emerge aggregate complexity, imitating facets of nature.
> Putting this all in perspective, if physicists ever uncover a Theory of Everything for our universe, and even if we deduce the initial state of the universe, we may still be helpless to deduce the long-term behavior of our own universe. Thus, as Stewart has said, the Theory of Everything in this case predicts everything but explains nothing.<p>Isn't it the other way around with these cell automatons? We have explanation (cause we know all the rules and the initial configuration) but we don't have enough computational power to predict anything meaningfull long term.
That green CRT "Ridley Scott Alien" demo is really compelling. I know it's from an actual CRT decades ago, but it would still work well today.