Hi Andy, You have now attacked me two days in a row, on two separate threads on this [math-fun] mailing list. If I'm sensing the "Hating Meanness", you are indeed reminding me of the Chas automaton (who seems to be showing some improvement in resisting ad hominem over the last two days). To try and straighten out the story, I've written my own competing article in the New Buddhist Times (a computer tabloid on google groups): "Guns, Gliders, Spaceships, and Pulsars--Fifty years later, Game of Life authors still have yet to discover flowers." https://groups.google.com/g/alt.religion.buddhism.nichiren/c/InZhKTZBAF8 This particular article makes relatively little mention of local/global conspiracy theories, religious fascism, and/or comic-book/manga/anime super villians, so I think it would be possible for you to read and learn something. You don't have to listen, but if you don't listen, your attacks will miss the mark. The conclusion is that, if we wanted to model a Lotus Field, GoL, despite its universality, would not be a good choice of language. Here are a few more articles I found while working on this opinion piece: https://www.chicagobotanic.org/plantinfo/lotus_american_yellow https://www.wikihow.com/Grow-Lotus-Flower Cheers, --Brad On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 8:10 PM Andy Latto <andy.latto@pobox.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 7:42 PM Brad Klee <bradklee@gmail.com> wrote:
Now, as far as exponential growth after the seed is triggered, no can do. GoL has a ceiling of quadratic growth.
This is a huge problem, because exponential population growth is common in nature—as we saw with “insect pandemics” earlier this year.
I think the general principle is that "X grows exponentially" for
anything in the physical world means "we don't yet understand the mechanisms by which the current exponential growth will slow down", or perhaps "we only care about the growth of X in the short term". I don't think there's necessarily a qualitative difference between the real world and Life as to exponential growth.
These insect populations that you say "grow exponentially"; if you look over a time scale where the volume of the insects, if it grew exponentially, would be larger than the volume of the earth, this would not happen, so the growth will at some point cease to be exponential.
In life, you could design a self-replicating configuration that, when it reproduces, uses its PRNG to choose a random location in the sphere of radius 1 trillion, and moves the offspring to that location, where it then precodes to reproduce. The number of copies of the organism would grow exponentially until they started to run into each other.
Andy _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun