The Game of Life

In its own way, water is capable of processing data. To aid in comprehending this concept, let’s play a classic game: the Game of Life.

The Game of Life by John Conway visualizes how simple rules generate a complex and diverse outcome. In 1970, John Conway worked as a mathematician in Cambridge University, England. During that period, he initially presented the principles of the game in an article published in Scientific American. Currently, it is a widespread and inspiring classic, creating interest through generations, in different sciences and disciplines.

The game area is a grid of cells, square paper for example. Each cell has eight neighbours and two states: alive (filled) or dead (empty). The initial pattern of living cells is set to game area. The pattern is up to you, the player. Experiment freely and open-mindedly with different patterns - you will see, learn and be surprised about how the game eventually proceeds.

The rules - the algorithm - for the Game of Life are as follows:

If a living cell has two or three living neighbours, the cell will be alive on the next generation also. Otherwise, the cell dies of loneliness (less than two living neighbours) or of overpopulation (more than three neighbours).

A dead cell comes to life if it has three, no more or less, living neighbours.

For each generation, the states of all the cells are calculated using the previous generation as a basis. When every cell’s new state is determined, generation changes, i.e. the entire game area is swapped to a new one displaying cells with new states.

The pictured example stops after six generations leaving an empty grid, with no living cells on it. Some patterns continue for several generations, some go on forever. The initial situation on the game area defines the result; randomness is not involved. In the spirit of Einstein’s famous proverb: in the Game of Life world, God does not play dice, for sure. On some versions, it is possible to alter the outcome by dropping living cells to a game area in mid-game. In that case, however, the deepest nature of the game might become slightly blurred.

The outcome (output) from the current generation acts as a seed (input) for the next generation. This is an iterative and recursive process - process feeding itself. Recursion is a way to achieve richness of the form and outcome with only a few short rules. You can think the world working similarly; taking the current state of everything - every particle, every planet, every apple hanging on the tree - applying some rules to them, spitting the next state out and starting it over again.

One of the major significances of the game lies in its ability to teach and pinpoint how simple rules can lead to unexpected, varied and diverse results, to unknown territory. Upon playing with it, it is very easy to believe that a beautiful and intricate flower of nature can indeed emerge as a result of a simple process. The two dimensional world of the game is an excellent playground and laboratory for studying and researching all kinds of phenomena.

At first, the game was run as a manual process. Graph paper and physical game pieces were used. The computers were utilized later and now the Internet is full of Game of Life programs with all kinds of variations.

It has been proven that on a world of Game of Life it is possible to simulate the basic building blocks of computers: logic gates. In principle and in practise, a computer can be built inside the game world. However, the game area would be an enormous one and the task would be elaborate; though it could be accomplished with an other computer program.

The Game of Life world is digital; each cell can have two states. Go by the water, toss small stones to it. The waves mold the water surface, which acts as the game area. Let’s define so that water molecules take the role of game cells. The state of each molecule is governed by the state of the neighbour molecules, and naturally, by the current state of the molecule itself – resembling the Game of Life rules. Waves on a water surface are analog; they can be of multiple levels of height. In this sense, the water molecules constituting the waves can have multiple states. Each emerging version of water surface is an outcome of a recursive process.

If Game of Life operates on digital, two-state logic, it can be presented that surface of water operates on analog, multiple-state logic. Water can process a highly vast number of inputs in parallel. It takes a massive computer to create and emulate a detailed real-time simulation of water; the splashes, the waves superimposing on each other, the movement of colliding surface-tensioned water drops. In fact, current computational power is not enough for simulating moving H20 molecules in a glass of water - all 10^24 of them. As a bold proposition and thought experiment, could there be a method of utilizing water’s processing capabilities – is there a way to program a bucket of water? Will there be a sleek sphere filled with water which, after connecting it to our personal computer, provides additional processing power?