Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
Losing the Search for Infinity Deal
We got close, but we didn’t quite make it, possibly because Mandelbrot himself put in
a word against the project, or possibly because I made the error of sending Jeff my twentypage
treatment in Microsoft Word format rather than in Acrobat PDF format. Jeff’s version
of Word had a different normal.dot file, which removed all the breaks or indentations
between paragraphs ⎯ turning my eleven-draft twenty-page script into, sob, a repellently
monolithic block of text. And Jeff, who’d waited till the very last hour to send in the
proposal, didn’t notice before emailing it in. Whatever.
Extra Rows for the Excitation Table
Replenishing
Rule
Seeding Rule
Spreading
Rule
Exhaustion
Rule
Randomly
change some
2 → 0
Randomly
change some
0 → 1
0 → 1 if any
neighbor is
1
Always
1→ 2
Always
2 → 0
Only
seed at
startup
0 → 1 if
two
neighbors
are 1
Always
1→2
People become
ready for
something new
Artifacts are
launched
People tell their
friends about an
artifact
People lose
interest in an
artifact
Resting
neurons
recover and
become ready
to fire
External inputs
to the brain
Neurons
stimulate their
neighbors
After firing, a
neuron needs to
rest
The Starwars CA
As a visually-oriented cellular automatist (i.e. a computer fanatic who spends hours
staring at weird screens), I tend to be more interested in dynamic behaviors than in statistics.
I’m more intrigued by scuttling gliders and writhing Zhabotinsky scrolls than I am by log log
graphs of power laws. Might we hope to model social behaviors by fully deterministic CAs
that seethe interestingly when started with pretty much any kind of pattern at all?
Certainly Brian’s Brain is a class four computation capable of producing, all on its
own, as much disorder and gnarl as we need ⎯ and it never dies out. And there are many
rules like it. In the figure below I show an excitation-based rule called StarWars that settles
into a pattern of grid-like globs with sparks racing around the glob edges and gliders
shuttling back and forth.
p. 84