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What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

161 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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!

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[–] z500@startrek.website 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

On the subject of Conway's Game of Life, one of the YouTube videos that I always have to go back to now and then is a narrated video of the game being built from the ground up in APL. It's so wild to see the guy start with a simple expression and the algorithm taking shape as he adds to it step by step. By the end it looks like some magical incantation lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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[–] JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Good bot

[–] nekat_emanresu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

O_O....

Dudes a genius magician that practices dark arts that make magnets look easy to understand.

[–] joneskind@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Emergence.

Conway's Game Of Life blew my mind when I first saw it live. The fact that it is Turing Complete is crazy too.