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<p>Great find! I remember reading about Barricelli in (younger)
Dyson's "Darwin Among the Machines" but didn't appreciate most of
what is described in this piece.<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><another long-winded memoiresque reflection on early days of
"modern" CA/></p>
<p><a
href="https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326990.pdf"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"><img
src="cid:part1.0HGFt01D.mOXG5qnO@swcp.com"
moz-do-not-send="false"><br>
</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326990.pdf"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326990.pdf</a></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>In 1983 at the CA conference held at LANL there were myriad
references to "non-standard" CA of various types, ranging as I
remember it, from Crutchfield's video-feedback CA (vidicon tube
camera pointed at CRT with various mechanical and electronic
adjusters (distance, zoom, rotation, focus) to emulate different
2D rules... wonderfully analog, all ntsc, a *very expensive*
digital capture card in the loop. There was also a dedicated
digital computer being built to execute CA directly (Margolis, et
al?) that I'm guessing went nowhere in the long run. I was
shocked to find out how young Wolfram was (2 years my junior)
because I felt like "just a kid" at 26. I think Gosper presented
his proto-Golly (memoization) HashLife?<br>
</p>
<p> I think it was that conference (but might have been the follow
on "Evolution Games and Life" (precursor to the ALife conferences)
) where Ed Fredkin circulated a photocopied hand-typed paper
outlining his "Digital Physics" concept ( with header footer
declaring " D (R) A F T ". He was very charming. It was also
followed by Feynman giving his "Plenty of Room at the Bottom"
lecture at LANL proper which he ended with an outline of K. Eric
Drexler's Master's thesis which had not yet become the well known
seminal book "Engines of Creation".</p>
<p>Re: Barricelli's 1D CA, I remember that at the conference one of
the budding luminaries (maybe Farmer, maybe Packard, maybe
Crutchfield?) gave a talk/paper on the notion of universality in
CA... including a methodology for translating one configuration
(spatial and state-space dimension) into another. So in this
case, in principle, something like Baricelli's 1D CA could
emulate/execute/interpret any other CA. </p>
<p>I believe that Ulam was still alive (died later that year?) but
definitely not available for the conference but during that era I
often arrived at my parking spot near the time Nick Metropolis did
and while our offices were in different buildings, it felt a boon
to see him so often, shuffling in. <br>
</p>
<p>On the topic of non-standard state-space/geometries/topologies,
that conference kicked off a small side-project for me writing the
code (C) for a CA to model the possible "information processing on
Cyteskeletal Lattice" (Microtubules) with Stuart Hameroff.
(most) MT are 3-off helical 13 unit tubes of proteins (alpha-beta
tubulin), so there were no obvious extant simulation frameworks
for implementing such a thing and there was no theory really of
what *might* be going on at the tubulin-level to represent a
"state space" so a lot of what we did was raw speculation... I was
actually surprised the work got accepted into Physica D. <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a
href="https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The paper yielded a contact from (sir!) Roger Penrose who
insisted that the key to consciousness was in "aperiodic
tilings". I don't think we referenced it in the paper but I *had*
thought a lot about the possible implications of the implied
complexity space of a 2-state CA (inspired by Frolich
Oscillations) in the 3-off 13 unit geometry with a (skew)
hexagonal neighborhood kernel. I never got far on those
reflections though they have come back to me time and again over
the decades. I was not then (nor have been since) employed by
anyone to work on or even think about such things, but that didn't
stop me, just slowed me down. To make a long story short(ish) I
blew off Penrose by not responding (*of course, when you have an
a-periodic tiling hammer, everything looks like an a-periodic
nail!*) but he eventually connected directly with Hameroff (and
the rest is history).</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a
href="https://neuroscienceblog.net/2020/10/31/quantum-consciousness/">https://neuroscienceblog.net/2020/10/31/quantum-consciousness/<br>
</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Part of what triggered this tangent (doesn't take much does it?)
was Roger's reference to the Baricelli paper being typewritten.
My original drafts of the MT paper were all hand-typed (on a CRAY1
over a time-sharing key-board concentrator with a dot-matrix
printer beside my DEC CRT terminal) but our resident writer-editor
actually retyped it all on an IBM Selectric (it was just her
process!). While the UofA graphics arts dept did a manual
rendering of the images of CA on MT, the originals were all
character-graphics!</p>
<p>And here we are on the verge (or not) of AGI or ASI ? And
Nanotech? The first Fullerenes (C60) werent "discovered" until a
year later (1985!)<br>
</p>
<p>...we do live in interesting times...</p>
<p>though it may all get washed under by iteratively trained LLMs to
where the noosphere consists *entirely* of AI hallucinations with
only the barest residue of "original works" by humans? Or maybe
our own self-licking ice-cream-cone of culture already folded in
all primary experience... nothing you can't get back to with an
appropriate dose of psychadelics? Full circle? Or more of an
ellipse? or a toroid, or a helix? bah!<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/10/25 6:59 AM, Roger Critchlow
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAGayqouFx_wRCg_ctjpUEJz=QvSzWbtmtyrySMGL_4yM+uEoOg@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">discoveries from the prehistory of cellular
automata, artificial life, and chaos theory, when papers were
typewritten
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a href="https://akkartik.name/post/2024-08-30-devlog"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://akkartik.name/post/2024-08-30-devlog</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>via hackernews</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>or maybe a chatGPT hallucination</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>-- rec --</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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