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