[FRIAM] the patterns of barricelli

Fri Jan 10 11:37:39 EST 2025

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.

    <another long-winded memoiresque reflection on early days of
    "modern" CA/>

https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326990.pdf

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?

  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".

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.

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.

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.

    https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices

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).

    https://neuroscienceblog.net/2020/10/31/quantum-consciousness/
    <https://neuroscienceblog.net/2020/10/31/quantum-consciousness/>

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!

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!)

...we do live in interesting times...

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!

On 1/10/25 6:59 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> discoveries from the prehistory of cellular automata, artificial life, 
> and chaos theory, when papers were typewritten
>
> https://akkartik.name/post/2024-08-30-devlog
>
> via hackernews
>
> or maybe a chatGPT hallucination
>
> -- rec --
>
>
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