1. Describe Conway’s Game of Life. Then explain why it is a useful thinking tool.

Here are some

points you might find helpful in explaining why it is a useful thinking tool:
(i) at first glance, it seems obvious that nothing interesting or impressive could arise in the
extremely simple and entirely deterministic “world” of the Game of Life;
(ii) even though we know the complete “physics” of the Game of Life, we cannot help but notice
and take seriously the manifest image—the still lifes, flashers, gliders, eaters, puffer trains,
space rakes and other denizens of the Game-of-Life world;
(iii) these denizens exhibit properties their component cells do not;
(iv) these denizens can be arranged into larger arrangements with really remarkable abilities,
such as universal computation and self-replication, the latter of which is arguably the essence of
(real, actual) life;
(v) a complete description of all on and off cells at all instants during some time period in the
Game of Life seems hopelessly inadequate as a total description during that time period despite
the fact that one can also say that there is nothing in the Game of Life other than different
arrangements of on and off cells (compare: the imaginary demon who can predict the future
according to deterministic laws can make predictions at a very simple physical level; where are
the thoughts and actions that the demon is supposed to be able to predict? Where are the
genes, organisms, organs, brains, and behaviors? Why is this imaginary demon supposed to
pose a challenge to our free will when it's entirely unclear that this demon knows what a bone is,
let alone a skull, let alone a human skull, let alone a human action, let alone a human action
undertaken after rational, thoughtful deliberation?)

Dennett p.212 -218

66. A DETERMINISTIC TOY: CONWAY’S GAME OF LIFE

➔ If you can’t make a hard problem relatively simple, you are probably not going about it
the right way. Simplification is not just for beginners.

➔ Artificial intelligence (AI) has its own simple cases, known as “toy problems,” which, as
the name suggests, are deliberately oversimplified versions of “serious” real-world
problems. Many of the most interesting programs devised in AI are solutions to toy
problems—such as getting a computer program to build simple structures in the blocks
world, a virtual world consisting of a tabletop with a bunch of movable children’s blocks
on it.
➔ Physicists and philosophers and others have argued for several millennia about whether
our universe is deterministic, or whether there are some genuinely undetermined events:
utterly unpredictable “random” events that just happen without anything causing them to
happen.
➔ Even experienced thinkers may find new insights by playing around with Life, the
breathtakingly simple model of a deterministic world created by the mathematician John
Horton Conway and his graduate students in 1970.
➔ Life is played on a two-dimensional grid, such as a checkerboard, using simple counters,
such as pebbles or pennies. The grid divides the plane into square cells, and each cell is
either ON or OFF at each moment. (If it is ON, place a penny on the square; if it is OFF,
 leave the square empty.) Notice that each cell has eight neighbors: the four adjacent
cells—north, south, east, and west—and the four diagonals—northeast, southeast,
southwest, and northwest.
➔ Time in the Life world is discrete, not continuous; it advances in ticks, and the state of
the world changes between each tick according to the following rule:
➔ Life Physics: For each cell in the grid, count how many of its eight neighbors are ON at
the present instant. If the answer is exactly two, the cell stays in its present state
(ON or OFF) in the next instant. If the answer is exactly three, the cell is ON in the
next instant whatever its current state. Under all other conditions the cell is OFF.
While this is the fundamental law of the “physics” of the Life world, it helps at first to
conceive this curious physics in biological terms: think of cells going ON as births, cells
going OFF as deaths, and succeeding instants as generations. Either overcrowding
(more than three inhabited neighbors) or isolation (less than two inhabited neighbors)
leads to death. Consider a few simple cases
➔ Flasher:

In the configuration only cells D and F have exactly three neighbors ON, so they will be the
only birth cells in the next generation. Cells B and H each have only one neighbor ON, so
they die in the next generation. Cell E has two neighbors ON, so it stays on. So the next
“instant” will look like figure 3.
Obviously, the configuration will revert back in the next instant, and this little pattern will flip-
flop back and forth indefinitely, unless some new ON cells are brought onto the scene
somehow. It is called a flasher or traffic light.

➔ Still life:
what will happen here? Nothing Each ON cell has
three neighbors ON, so it is reborn just as it is.
No OFF cell has three neighbors ON, so no other
births happen. This configuration is called a still life.

ამგვარი კონფიგურაციებით დავასკვნით: In other

words, the Life world is a toy world that perfectly
instantiates the determinism made famous by the early-nineteenth-century French scientist Pierre Laplace:
given the state description of this world at an instant, we observers can perfectly predict
the future instants by the simple application of our one law of physics. Or we could put it
this way: when we adopt the physical stance toward a configuration in the Life world, our
powers of prediction are perfect: there is no noise, no uncertainty, no probability less than one.

Glider
თუმცა დიაგონალურად თუ განვალაგებთ მალე სისტემა მთლიანად გაქრება.
The flasher, we saw, has a two-generation period that continues ad infinitum, unless some other
configuration encroaches (შეღწევა). Encroachment is what makes Life interesting: among the
periodic configurations are some that swim, amoeba-like, across the plane. The simplest is the
glider, the five-pixel configuration shown taking a single stroke to the southeast in figure 6.

Then there are the eaters, the puffer trains and space rakes, and a host of other aptly named denizens
(ადგილობრივები, მაცხოვრებლები) of the Life world that emerge as recognizable objects at a new
level (analogous to the design level). This level has its own language, a transparent foreshortening of the
tedious descriptions one could give at the physical level. For instance:

Eaters:

An eater can eat a glider in four generations. Whatever is being consumed, the basic
process is the same. A bridge forms between the eater and its prey. In the next generation, the
bridge region dies from overpopulation, taking a bite out of both eater and prey. The eater then
repairs itself. The prey usually cannot. If the remainder of the prey dies out as with the glider,
the prey is consumed. [Poundstone, 1985, p. 38]

შენიშნეთ მოძრაობა უძრაობაში, სიამრტივეში

Notice that something curious happens to our “ontology”—our catalogue of what exists—as we
move between levels. At the physical level there is no motion, only ON and OFF, and the
only individual things that exist, cells, are defined by their fixed spatial location. At the
design level we suddenly have the motion of persisting objects; it is one and the same
glider (though each generation is composed of different cells) that has moved southeast in
figure 5, changing shape as it moves; and there is one less glider in the world after the eater
has eaten it in figure 7.
Notice too that whereas at the physical level, there are absolutely no exceptions to the
general law, at this level our generalizations have to be hedged: they require “usually” or
“provided nothing encroaches” clauses. Stray bits of debris from earlier events can “break” or
“kill” one of the objects in the ontology at this level. Their salience as real things is considerable, but not
guaranteed. To say that their salience (მნიშვნელობა) is considerable is to say that o ne can, with
some small risk, ascend to this design level, adopt its ontology, and proceed to predict—
sketchily and riskily—the behavior of larger configurations or systems of configurations,
without bothering to compute the physical level. For instance, one can set oneself the task
of designing some interesting super-system out of the “parts” that the design level makes
available.

ქონვეის როგორ დაებადა ეგ იდეა

They designed, and proved the viability of the design of, a self-reproducing entity
composed entirely of Life cells. Grinding away deterministically on its infinite plane, it would
copy itself perfectly, and then its copy would copy itself, and so forth. It was also (for good
measure) a Universal Turing machine: a two-dimensional computer that in principle can
compute any computable function!
They were trying to answer at a very abstract level one of the central questions of biology: What
is the minimal complexity required for a self-reproducing thing? They were following up
the brilliant early speculations of John von Neumann, who had been working on the
question at the time of his death in 1957. Francis Crick and James Watson had discovered
the structure of DNA in 1953, but how it worked was a mystery for many years. Von Neumann
had imagined in some detail a sort of floating robot that picked up pieces of flotsam and jetsam
that could be used to build a duplicate of itself, and that would then be able to repeat the
process. His description (posthumously published, 1966) of how an automaton would read its
own blueprint and then copy it into its new creation anticipated in impressive detail many
of the later discoveries about the mechanisms of DNA expression and replication, but in
order to make his proof of the possibility of a self-reproducing automaton mathematically
rigorous and tractable, von Neumann had switched to simple, two-dimensional
abstractions, now known as cellular automata. Conway’s Life world cells are a particularly
agreeable example of cellular automata.

They wanted something dead simple, easy to visualize and easy to calculate, so they not only
dropped from three dimensions to two but also “digitized” both space and time: all times and
distances, as we saw, are in whole numbers of “instants” and “cells.” It was von Neumann who
had taken Alan Turing’s abstract conception of a mechanical computer (now called a Turing
machine) and engineered it into the specification for a general-purpose stored-program serial-
processing computer (now called a von Neumann machine), and in his brilliant explorations of
the spatial and structural requirements for such a computer, he had realized—and proved—that
a Universal Turing machine (see part IV) could in principle be “built” in a two-
dimensional world. 1 Conway and his students also set out to confirm this with their own
exercise in two-dimensional engineering. 2 It was far from easy, but they showed how they
could “build” a working computer out of simpler Life forms. Glider streams can provide the
input-output “tape,” for instance, and the tape-reader can be some huge assembly of eaters,
gliders, and other bits and pieces. What does this machine look like? Poundstone (1985)
calculated that the whole construction would be on the order of 10^13 cells or pixels.
A self-reproducing pattern would be a hazy glow, like a galaxy. [pp. 227–288] In other words, by
the time you have built up enough pieces into something that can reproduce itself (in a two-
dimensional world), it is roughly as much larger than its smallest bits as an organism is larger
than its atoms. You probably can’t do it with anything much less complicated, though this has
not been strictly proved.

3 main principles that Game of Life represents:

1) First, notice how the distinction between the physical stance and the design stance
gets blurred here. Do gliders, for instance, count as designed things, or as natural
objects —like atoms and molecules? The tape-reader that Conway and his students
cobbled out of gliders and eaters and the like must count as designed if anything does,
but its ingredients are quite raw materials —the simplest “things” in the Life world.
Nobody had to design or invent the glider; it was discovered to be implied by the
physics of the Life world. But that, of course, is actually true of everything in the Life
world. Nothing happens in the Life world that isn’t strictly implied—logically
deducible by straightforward theorem-proving—by the physics and the initial
configuration of cells. Some of the things in the Life world are just more marvelous and
unanticipated (by us, with our puny intellects) than others. There is a sense in which the
Conway self-reproducing computer pixel-galaxy is “just” one more Life macromolecule
with a very long and complicated periodicity in its behavior. This nicely illustrates
a parallel point about biology and the origin of life: amino acids, one might say, just
are; they didn’t have to be designed. But proteins, composed of nothing but amino acids,
are too fancy; they are at least sorta designed. Darwin’s gradualism makes yet another
appearance
2) Second, the Life world, being deterministic, has a perfectly predictable future for every
possible configuration, but, somewhat surprisingly, its past is often perfectly inscrutable
(შეუცნობადი, გაურკვეველი, ბუნდოვანი)! Consider the still life consisting of four
ON pixels in a square. You can’t tell from looking at it, or even looking at it and its
neighborhood, what its past was. To see this, note that any three of the four pixels ON
would lead, in the next generation, to this still life of four pixels ON. Whether any of those
cells were OFF in the past is an inert historical fact
3) Third, recall how important “noise” and collisions were in creating the mutations
that evolution— like other creative processes—feeds on. Conway’s huge
construction reproduced itself, but it couldn’t mutate. It would always make a
perfect copy of itself, and in order to introduce mutations into the picture, the whole
construction would have to be enlarged many fold. Why? Because the Life world is
deterministic, so the only way a “random” mutation can occur is if some stray bit of stuff
wanders (pseudo-randomly) onto the scene and breaks something. But the smallest
moving thing is a glider, so think of it as like a single photon, or cosmic ray, moving at
the speed of (Life physics) light. A single glider can do a lot of damage; if it must barely
“tweak” something in the genome of the self-reproducing thing without destroying the
genome, that genome is going to have to be very large, relative to the glider, and quite
robust. It might well be provable that evolution could not occur in the Life world,
no matter how large we made the entities, if it turned out that these galaxy-sized
assemblages were just too fragile to survive an occasional rain of gliders.