From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jun 17 2002 - 12:06:08 MDT
On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 12:11:55PM -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> As I recall from the review, Wolfram says there are something like 36
> rules total among all CA, that anything else is simply a variation of
> one of these rules. If so, then while you could have infinite variation,
> you won't have infinite combination, thus the universe is computable and
> able to be defined as a particular CA.
He is right in that among simple systems there are surprisingly few
different behaviors. But these are the macroscopic behaviors. Especially
in the chaotic or Turing-complete behaviors a tiny difference in the
rules - which could become relevant very rarely - would produce a
drastically different behavior. So if the universe is equivalent to a
Turing complete CA or something similar, the eact rule does matter a
lot. It would be nice if it turned out that the simplest possible such
rule would produce the universe, but so far I can't see anything like
that in rule 110.
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