What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

tatterdemalion,
@tatterdemalion@programming.dev avatar

Molecular Motors

luthis, (edited )

Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.

Heres another one. Michael behe’s mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.

Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.

The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.

But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can’t exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.

This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.

Djh8878,

What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Just look up “The Game of Life.” It’s not really a spread sheet, that’s simply how it’s displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.

aCosmicWave,

Yep! The spreadsheet is just an analogy I used to help unfamiliar people visualize what I was talking about.

The actual rules for Conway’s Game of Life are as follows:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction
DAC_Protogen,
@DAC_Protogen@lemmy.ml avatar

Pineapple on pizza, MUAHAHAHA! (I actually like that o.o )

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