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Next-Gen Game of Life
SQL31337 writes "Jecology is a life simulator created in the spirit of Conway's Game of Life. It touches on many topics such as cellular automata, ecological balance, and the food chain. There is only one type of creature in Conway's Game of Life(CGoL). They reproduce, but do not mutate or evolve. They do not have to find food, but instead simply die based on scarcity or overpopulation. Jecology encompasses these aspects of ecology with a more complex simulation, but retains much of the elegant simplicity found in CGoL. Jecology is not merely a life simulator, but an ecology simulator. It is also an example of a complex system arising from simple rules, as described in A New Kind of Science. Screenshots and info about Jecology here."
I mean that the physics of the ruleset can be used to implement a universal turing machine. See this for a pre-universal example.
This means, of course, that the game of life can emulate itself. An open question (as far as I know) is whether there is a more efficient emulation method that takes deeper advantage of the rules, rather than passing through a "general computation" layer.
I've had this sig for three days.
I was, er, privileged enough to hear Wolfram speak at the Artificial Life 9 conference last year. Going in, I fully expected his head to expand to fill all available space in the room. But as it turned out, the self-ego-stroking was far less than I expected, and the only particularly ridiculous thing to come out of the talk was his unnecessary use of an acronym - NKS - which stood for nothing more than "New Kind of Science". (The book goes on to suggest that this new kind of science, which is not much more than Yet Another Computational Model, would revolutionize a wide variety of scientific fields. Wolfram was somewhat more reserved concerning this possibility during his talk.)
;)
Three mornings later, Eors Szathmary gave the featured session, helpfully and humorously noting that his talk would for our benefit remain focused on OKS.
I tried some variations such as having them stop eating when the population of their prey gets too low. They still manage to extinct themselves eventually. If I get past Z, it just keeps going into higher characters.