Cellular Automata, Jazz And The Edge Of Chaos
Images (top) self-explanatory from Charles Crowley at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/Complexity/index.html (bottom) Stephen Wolfram's four classes of cellular automata illustrating diversity with small initial differences or perturbations. Studies in Chaotic Systems, which are sub-cases of Complex Systems, show four types of movements: (1) movements that eventually become extinct of (2) movements which produce regular cycles (3) movements which grow structurally but the growth is not totally predictable (4) movements which dissolve into utter chaos. It is category 3 that is most interesting as it seems to represent the state which Life in this Universe follows and may explain how interesting, complex systems, such as living things, arise in a world where one of the most fundamental principles is that entropy, that is disorder, always increases. [Second Law of Thermodynamics]. Experiments carried out with Cellular Automata [which are grids created on a computer and populated and all...