Stephen Wolfram on Game of Life (2025)
Review of Stephen Wolfram Article on Game of Life
- What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?
- By Stephen Wolfram.
- https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what-can-we-learn-about-engineering-and-innovation-from-half-a-century-of-the-game-of-life-cellular-automaton/
My Review
the good parts:
- Summarize important concepts and highlight of greatest discoveries of Conway Game of Life (GOL).
- Great and novel visualization. E.g. Use 3d to show history, evolution diagram of “modularity”
- Novel idea of studying pattern's evolution by “modularity”
- Analysis of discovery history , by modularity, by discovery method, by cell size reduction, etc.
bad parts:
The article's purpose, of viewing the progress of GOL as some “metaengineering”, i.e. As a glimpse of how science and engineering are discovered or made, in view of computation irreducibility, where the universe is a computation.
Am not sure how useful is this, other than pushing this view.
This view, is philosophical view. So either you believe it, or not.