LIFE IS A CLASS 4 CELLULAR AUTOMATA

To all the ardent Creationists and Theists who keep writing to me re the posts on 'God' on this Blog. Thanks, but no thanks. I respect your need for religion but there are many like me who don't need it. So leave us alone.

Here is a re-post from my Facebook:

LIFE IS A CLASS 4 CELLULAR AUTOMATA
To the Creationists and Theists who inhabit my Facebook, I understand that Religion is ultimately a quantum leap of faith and it is suitable for some people. But I am impressed by my correspondence with a pastor in Georgia, USA-who did use Science to explore alternative views of the origin of the Universe and Life before taking that leap of faith. I applaud him for that though I disagree with his conclusion. He has read Richard Dawkin's many books, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, dabbled with Artificial Intelligence, and played with Cellular Automata such as Conway's Game Of Life (available as an iOS app). Cellular Automata are a simulation of Life played out on a grid, where from a few cells, myriad patterns evolve over the generations. Wolfram classified four Classes of cellular automata:
Class 1 - point attractors. The system freezes into a fixed state after a short time (the transient behaviour).
Class 2 - limit cycles. The system develops periodic behaviours, which then repeat continuously.
Class 3 - chaotic. The system becomes aperiodic, continuously changing in unpredictable and random ways.
Class 4 - structured. System can develop in highly patterned but unstable ways. Computationally rich. This is life: part deterministic, part random, always on the edge of Chaos, going against the Second Law Of Thermodynamics' irreversible decay. Class 4 Automata exhibit properties of Emergence, Self-Organization and Evolution, Critical Thresholds, networks and hubs,and non-linearity and also known as Complex Adaptive Systems: human society,stock markets, traffic jams, ant colonies, flocks and herds of animals etc are all Complex Adaptive Systems.

Attached is an image of Conway's Game of Life where with just 5 filled cells (R-Pentamino)and simple rules, a Universe of myriad creatures evolve.

Above screenshot was generated in a few minutes using an App on my iPad. Class 1 dead patterns exist beside Class 2 Oscillators and a Pulsar. On May 18 2010, a new pattern was discovered by Andrew Wade which not only is able to replicate itself, but self-destructs after giving birth. He named it Gemini.

December 26, 2011 at 9:15pm · Like

Unfortunately, Gemini takes 34 million generations to appear. At 0.5 seconds a generation on the computer, it would mean running the program for 196 days. So you can see from this that evolution can throw up astounding results/products but that's because it has the luxury of time.

December 27, 2011 at 8:13am · Like