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

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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
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Figure: The StarWars Rule. Starting from a random bath of pixels, StarWars settles into pattern resembling an aerial view of a busy factory. In the center we have a glob shooting out a regular stream of gliders which disintegrate when they hit the little block to its right. The more regularlooking horizontal and vertical lines are also streams of gliders. Small sparks flicker around the edges of the globs. Now and then a rogue glider crashes into a glob and kicks up a prolonged cascade of reactions. The StarWars rule has four states, which we think of as being a ready state, a firing state, and two distinct two resting states. The update rule is similar to that of Brian’s Brain, with two differences: it’s possible for a cell to continue firing for more than one update, and the cells rest for two updates instead of one. The grids are made up of firing cells that stimulate each other to continue firing, while the little gliders are made of firing cells trailed by resting cells. StarWars worlds smaller than 500 by 500 pixels become periodic in about 40,000 generations, but I’m not sure if the larger worlds begin repeating themselves within any reasonable time frame. At the very least the rule is class two, but my feeling is that, given p. 85
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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