What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?
For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
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What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out
Just look up "The Game of Life." It's not really a spread sheet, that's simply how it's displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.
Yep! The spreadsheet is just an analogy I used to help unfamiliar people visualize what I was talking about.
The actual rules for Conway's Game of Life are as follows: