Akce ČVUT

LIFE is not at the “border of chaos,” but thrives on the “border of extinction”

23.09.2019   11:00-12:30

Cowan's Game of LIFE is perhaps the most complex two-dimensional cellular automata (CA). There exists an informal, even folkloric, view that complex dynamic systems lie at an order-disorder critical line (the "border of chaos") and LIFE has been proposed as an example of such a critical system. Here we show that LIFE is not critical in this sense, but corresponds to a "critical" nucleation phenomenon: it has two coexisting phases (death and alive) competing with each one, with the slow growth of the death phase (the "border of extinction"). We propose that first-order transitions, phase coexistence and nucleation phenomena are better tools to deal with such CAs than second-order phase transitions concepts as done up to now. If we make the analogy, of the collection of CAs as a Multiverse (where each CA is a universe with its own physical rules), then we conclude that complex universes as LIFE are rare and inhabit at very special regions of the Multiverse parameter space.

Místo konání

Zenegerova room (KN:E-107)

Kontaktní osoba

Alberto Fraile García, frailalb@fel.cvut.cz

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