07 August 2008

Exploring Emergence

In some books on things like chaos and emergence, there are references to computer simulations/models like the game of life. This website Exploring Emergence lets you see those programmes, even lets you set initial conditions to see what happens as you then run the programme. It starts thus: "what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happening is that little squares on the screen are turning 'on' and 'off,' following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects and nothing at all about direction." It helps gain one an intuitive feel for the phenomena.

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