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by biggiemac42 1291 days ago
I think the portion that is fundamental is deeper than game of life itself. Game of life is a rule set with sufficient complexity to get this far, but it isn't the only one. Anything with this class of behavior will support systems including those resembling DNA, the question is at what scale it emerges. If the scale is too big (arguably the scale for the result in this post is too big), it's a less elegant kind of emergence.
1 comments

Agreed. One aspect of CA which interests me is robustness, the ability of a system to recover from error states.

What's been done with GoL is fascinating, but I think the next emergent layer of fascination for me is universal constructors which can handle a certain level of constant distributed noise or interference. A lot of times people just shrug and say, "well this pattern will always be critical/vulnerable in these locations, and cannot be made robust. But to me that opens up the door for entire classes of patterns which measure, embed and repair state of surrounding entities.