Fully self-directed replication

https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/fully-self-directed-replication/

by dvgrn • 8 years ago

48 4 8 years ago

cp4space.wordpress.com

dvgrn• 8 years ago

A self-constructing "0E0P" Conway's Life metacell is finally in working order!

The structure behaves like a single cell, obeying the rules of Life or whatever CA rule it's programmed to emulate. Unlike previous metacells, if a new cell has to be born, one of its neighbor metacells has to construct it starting from empty space.

leetbulb• 8 years ago

metacells blow my mind. i'll leave this here for anyone else interested: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

callesgg• 8 years ago

That made me think of a DMT trip. Makes me wounder about the nature of reality.

gene-h• 8 years ago

While making interesting constructs in cellular automata is a fun exercise, there is the possibility that the constructs might be useful in the real world. In the near term, it is much easier to make a molecular scale cellular automata than it is to make a conventional processor. The latter requires a complicated means of stitching together molecules, the former is a crystal which is much simpler to make. So a molecular cellular automata could potentially enable us to make a computer with a mole quantity of logic gates, but we need some way to program said computer. All this work in cellular automata constructs provides a way to do this. Although the more likely application of such molecular cellular automata might be the formation of patterns below the wavelength of light.

Fully self-directed replication

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