[woolion]

When we consider sets of rules that show emergent properties,very small details like the conflict resolutions discussed here can have a tremendous impact on how the general strategies would pan out at high level play. That really makes me think of how rules for "game-of-life" type of cellular automata rules can be designed. Small tweaks decide if the automata has a trivial computational power or is Turing-complete. Within the Turing-complete class there's a wide range of behaviors that can be obtained if we look at the structure that can spontaneously appear or statistical properties (e.g. what is the probability that the grid ends up entirely empty).

These observations are interesting as they give a test suite, or 'local properties', that can be run against any given simultaneous ruleset to characterize it. It would be fascinating to be able to run an AI to have an idea of how 'optimal strategies' (global properties) would look like in each case and see what relations we can draw from it.

(unfortunately I would assume it is still unreasonably costly to do something like this?)