The crucial experiment
Salient points:
- 4 types of behaviour in simple cellular automata: regular / periodic, nested, random (e.g. rule 30) and complex (e.g. rule 110, which has propagating patterns that interact)
- simple rules can lead to complex outcomes - i.e. the 'intuition' that simple causes lead to simple effects is wrong
- The only way to know what most of these rules do is to run them
Comments:
- It was pointed out that Wolfram's notion of complex is different to (say) Kolmogorov, who would say all this behaviour is simple since the generating rule is simple. So have I got this right: there's complexity of the behaviour, and complexity of the algorithm, and they're not related?? MarcusFrean
- FYI, from the discussion of Chapter 2 - the book about Neutral Theories in ecology is: Hubbell, SP, 2001. The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press
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