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!

  • fiat_lux
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    221 year ago

    Dear God, it’s beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)

    • @[email protected]
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      171 year ago

      It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.

      • speck
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        141 year ago

        Now we’re at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can’t let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.