[FRIAM] the patterns of barricelli

Fri Jan 10 12:38:59 EST 2025

SFI had one of these for a while.  (As far as I know it just sat there.)

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/cam8/

Nowadays GPUs are used for Lattice Boltzmann.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of steve smith
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2025 8:38 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the patterns of barricelli

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>

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/

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

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