Take a look at this awesome video of a Universal Turing Machine operating within Life. It is possible to build logic gates and combine them together into a computer that can simulate any Turing machine, all by setting up a particular elaborate pattern of 'on' and 'off' cells that evolve over time according to the simple rules above. It turns out that these simple rules are rich enough to permit patterns that perform arbitrary computation. Over time, the cells switch between on and off according to a simple set of rules:Ī cell that is 'on' and has fewer than two neighbors that are 'on' switches to 'off' at the next time stepĪ cell that is 'on' and has greater than three neighbors that are 'on' switches to 'off' at the next time stepĪn cell that is 'off' and has exactly three neighbors that are 'on' switches to 'on' at the next time step In Conway’s Game Life, which I will now refer to as just 'Life', there is a two-dimensional grid of cells where each cell is either on or off. In this post I am going to discuss a celular autonoma known as Conway’s Game of Life: I propose the AI hypothesis, which is that any pattern that solves the control question does so, essentially, by being an AI. I argue that the permissibility or impermissibility of AI is a deep property of our physics. This question is then connected to questions of agency and AI, since one way to answer this question in the positive is by constructing an AI within Conway’s Game of Life. This post asks whether it is possible, in Conway’s Game of Life, to arrange for a certain game state to arise after a certain number of steps given control only of a small region of the initial game state. I welcome financial support to make further posts like this possible.Įpistemic status: I have been thinking about these ideas for years but still have not clarified them to my satisfaction. Financial status: This is independent research.

Conway game of life stable