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Conway's game of life shows how small building blocks randomly create giant crazy complicated formations that have the capability to do astonishing things, like

Conway's game of life shows how small building blocks randomly create giant crazy complicated formations that have the capability to do astonishing things, like replicate themselves in an organized way. Kind of implying that logically functional structures arise from randomness given enough time. The rules in Conway's game of life are simpler than real world physics, but it is enough to convince me that in a reasonable time frame (Earth's timeline), given enough building blocks and iterations, there's not really any reason to not assume the chemical building blocks of life happened to create all sorts of complicated structures that constantly failed to replicate or survive. On Earth, there was a lot of primordial soup, and there were a lot of chemical reactions. On a span of millions of years, complex data structures (such as RNA) may have occurred constantly somewhere on the planet. Every now and then, a cell randomly formed. Sometimes prokaryotes with RNA formed, like weird things in Conway's game of life. And then maybe once upon a time, a cell with just the right RNA to make it be able to reproduce in the ooze formed. That or life on Earth is panspermic and we have skipped the pre-prokaryotic evolution altogether

dvt 6y ago
> The rules in Conway's game of life are simpler than real world physics This is tricky. Conway's rules are "simpler" but far more rigid (e.g. tractable/computable). In real life, we deal with not just plain ol' turbulence (Navier–Stokes three-dimensional existence is yet to be proved), but also quantum effects (some of which might also not be computable, such as entropy in a Hamiltonian system).
- fullstackchris 6y ago
  I'd say it's ultimately hard to argue if these more random constraints (compared to Conway's game of life) are more _helpful_ or _harmful_ towards the ability to produce life or life-like structures.
  - dvt 6y ago
    > ...more random constraints Want to point out that this is much more than simply "random" constraints (the universe isn't merely a probabilistic machine). These are not (or at least might not be) computable constraints; any comparison with Conway's Game of Life stops right there.
namanyayg 6y ago
Perhaps not Conway's version, but a 3 dimensional cellular automaton with 50-100+ states for each cell could very likely result in intelligent life over a large timeframe. Greg Egan discusses a similar idea with his concept of the "Autoverse"

dvt 6y ago

> The rules in Conway's game of life are simpler than real world physics This is tricky. Conway's rules are "simpler" but far more rigid (e.g. tractable/computable). In real life, we deal with not just plain ol' turbulence (Navier–Stokes three-dimensional existence is yet to be proved), but also quantum effects (some of which might also not be computable, such as entropy in a Hamiltonian system).

fullstackchris 6y ago
I'd say it's ultimately hard to argue if these more random constraints (compared to Conway's game of life) are more _helpful_ or _harmful_ towards the ability to produce life or life-like structures.
- dvt 6y ago
  > ...more random constraints Want to point out that this is much more than simply "random" constraints (the universe isn't merely a probabilistic machine). These are not (or at least might not be) computable constraints; any comparison with Conway's Game of Life stops right there.

namanyayg 6y ago

Perhaps not Conway's version, but a 3 dimensional cellular automaton with 50-100+ states for each cell could very likely result in intelligent life over a large timeframe. Greg Egan discusses a similar idea with his concept of the "Autoverse"