Overview

In 1970, John Conway a professor of Mathematics at university of Cambridge devised a model of life called game of life. It is actually not a game and evolves on it’s own between discrete time steps but here is how it works. Imagine an 8 by 8 square grid, like a chessboard. Now, at any given time step each square is either dead or alive (live cells). There are 4 rules dictating how the grid transforms over a time step given the state of the grid at previous time step. For the point I want to make these rules are not very important but they are as follows.

1.      Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.

2.      Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

3.      All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.

Considering the nature of the game, this can very easily be coded into a computer simulation and Conway asked one of his classes to do exactly this and show him what the game would look like at time interval 100 except on a 100 by 100 square grid. The class wrote a computer simulation for this and handed it over to Conway. Conway then took this evolved state at time 100 and asked his second class to observe it and find the underlying laws. Interestingly enough, instead of finding the underlying 3 laws, the class came up with multiple laws relevant to the macro level. I will provide examples for this in a bit. This is the idea behind a theory of everything. Because we are observing the universe at an evolved and complicated stage, we have come up with multiple laws governing the macroscopic level whereas, in essence, there might only be a few universal laws. A good example of this would be how we had different theories in physics for magnetism and electricity up until 1864 but it was then realized that a single underlying theory of electromagnetism is able to explain both phenomenon.

What’s even more interesting is that when Conway asked his third class to observe an even more evolved stage on a 1000 by 1000 grid, the class concluded that there are no laws and the motion of the squares is random. Does this then mean that just because something is too complicated to be determined, it can be attributed the quality of free will? Could this then be applied to the human mind? Just because the predictability of our actions cannot be safely made due to innumerable factors at play, does that make it free will? The only answer I have found to this question which helps me remain sane, that is if I am sane lol, is that if you can’t tell the difference does it really matter which one is which?

Something that is to be noted here is that the story of John Conway and his class that I tell here might not be true. I remember reading it somewhere but can’t find good sources to support it. However, what is important is that big ideas behind John conway’s game of life are solid and true. These big ideas are the ideas that it is possible for something simple and straightforward to give rise to not only structures which have their own laws at their levels but also to structures which can be classified as intelligent and in some cases possess free will. Let me explain these with examples.

Consider the structure of gliders in Game of life. They have a time period of 5 after which they return to their original shape but have displaced by 1 square diagonally. So a law for these on a macroscopic level would be that gliders move diagonally. Whereas, we know that there are only 3 laws governing this movement and any other macroscopic movement that might be observed.

Now to show you what I meant by intelligent structures, it is possible to have certain structures in the game of life which if fed an appropriate input will then provide an output a couple evolutions later. This would be the equivalent of a calculator receiving appropriate input and providing an output. For this Consider the glider gun in the following video.

Infact, all Boolean gates like AND and OR gates can be created using gliders. Probably what’s most interesting is how game of life can be created within game of life showing perfectly how laws can be deduced for each macro state and sometimes getting too complicated for us to break down and hence resulting in being classified as free will.