Conway's Game of Life

You have made this model.

I th- I thought it was a bit like Conway's Game of Life, kind of this model.

I don't know-

Ah [laughs]

So the, the way to think about some of the work that happens within my team more on the computational side is, um, you know, we're the experts in using these huge supercomputers and making these incredible high-performance models, but we're thinking in kind of pushing the boundaries of that about what are the computing hardware that's gonna be available to people, and how do we make kind of the next m- um, next generation even better predictions from these tools than what you're able to kind of get off the shelf today.

Um, and then we can, you know, deploy those models through, uh, uh, we release things open source all the time, but we can also work with commercial software companies to help them improve the predictions that they can make, so we can get that stuff kind of out into the world.

So the particular model that, that you're referring to as kind of like Conway's Game of Life, uh, it's a, it's a particular type of simulation for predicting microstructure, like, so the, the grains and the crystals that are inside of a metal, um, that's based on a, a algorithm called a cellular automata algorithm.

And so essentially what that does is it says, if I know how the material is cooling off- Then I can predict, uh, which grain is forming where, um, and what are the statistics of, you know, very, very large numbers, billions of these grains, which are the things that result in a lot of the properties that we see in these materials.

We need to understand the space of all possible intelligences, the space of all possible life forms that can be...

Conway's Game of Life is a super famous simulation by John Conway, where you have this grid of cells, this 2D grid of cells, and they can either be on or off, alive or dead, that's it.

And from this super, super simple world, it's like possibly the simplest possible thing you can think of, you run this, you get insane amounts of complexity that no one would have thought it could do until you actually run it.

You can do counterfactual analysis in other universes, In what worlds do we get this open-ended creation of complexity and emergence? And in what worlds do we not get that? Why does this physics, when you run it, it produces this amazing phenomenon.

And there's a small island of solutions where all of the coolest simulations lie.

Some of them actually end up creating little patterns which move around that look like cells.

This object, this cell-like object is exploiting the physics in a way to create a persisting object in this world, right? If you train them on calculus, they'll learn calculus.

You don't have to train them on arithmetic first.

I don't know if you know the video game.

It's called "Game of Life" or something.

It's-

Oh, yes.

Yeah, I like applying it to other certain things.

Like, if I go to, let's say, the Game of Life example, I can then just take this and be like, "Oh, turn e- uh, just turn this whole array of the Game of Life." Uh, I'm not gonna upscale it here.

I'm just gonna do, like, voxels, uh, set scale.

I'll do, like, three.

I think that should just work.

Um, and then, oh, and then I'll do some fog.

And so here's, like, my whole visual, three-dimensional visualization of the, the lifetime of this Game of Life simulation, which I think is cool.

That's awesome.

But I do love the confluence of things here from a James Burkean perspective, the, the, from whether it's autocorrect or Clippy or incredible video game, um, pseudo AIs like The Last of Us Part II had me completely empathizing with the enemy because the purpose of that game which was to give you a pause before you would like just m- d- tr- trying to get you to not be a murderous rampage beast but go, "I don't know if this is right what I'm doing anymore." And it's, you know, it's a game.

And the, all of those things, uh, coming together with old ideas like Conway's Game of Life and the Society of Mind stuff and, uh, the old Eliza thing, the, the IBM computer that beat Kasparov.

Deep Blue.

Yeah, Deep Blue, that's right.

I just described the cellular automaton hypothesis.

In this picture, the universe is a multidimensional version of Conway's Game of Life.

Such a universe could be reasonably thought of as a computation, cells stripped of all properties until they are indistinguishable from pure information, and together they form a sort of computer whose sole task is to compute its own evolution.

This may not be how our reality works, but it's an idea that many physicists take seriously.