I'm not a chemist, but perhaps a good analogy is making Mona Lisa with Game of Life? Recently posted on HN. Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life https://news

I'm not a chemist, but perhaps a good analogy is making Mona Lisa with Game of Life? Recently posted on HN. Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552006 From the article: "This looks kinda cool, but what if we want to find a Life state that eventually, after following the rules of Life for a few rounds, reaches a state that looks like Mona Lisa? This requires working backwards instead of forwards from the target picture, which is a much more difficult problem. (...) We call Life state A the "parent" of state B if A turns into B by following the rules of Life. The reason that it's difficult to find the parent of a state is that the rules of Life are non-reversible. There's no direct way to go from a Life state to its parent, and in fact, it's possible for a state to have multiple parents or even no parents. "