[FRIAM] the patterns of barricelli

[steve smith]

> 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.
>

such a blast-from-past with the awesome 90's stylized web page and the 
pics of the SUN (and Apollo?) workstations!

CAM8 is clearly the legacy of Margolis' work (MIT).   At the time (1983) 
I remember handwired/soldered breadboards and I think banks of memory 
chips wired through logic gates and such... I think this was pre SUN 
days (I had an M68000 Wicat Unix box on my desktop which sported a 
massive 5MB hard drive with pruned down BSD variant installed on it).  
In fact, that was where I ran the MT simulations (tuning rules until I 
got "interesting" activity, running parameter sweeps, etc).

When GPUs first rose up (SGI) they seemed hyper-apropriate to the 
purpose but alas, I had not spare cycles at that point in my career to 
look into it.  Just a few years ago when I was working on the Micoy 
Omnistereoscopic "camera ball" (you mentioned it looked a bit like  
coronavirus particle) I had specced out an FPGA fabric solution (with a 
dedicated FPGA wired directly between every adjacent overlapping camera 
pair - 52 cameras) to do realtime image de-distortion/stitching with the 
special considerations which stereo vison adds.   I never became a VHDL 
programmer but I did become familiar with the paradigm... I think I 
tried to engage Roger at a Wedtech on the topic when he was (also) 
investigating FPGAs.  (circa 2016?)

At that time, my fascination with CA had evolved into variations on 
Gosper's Hashlife...  so GPU and FPGA fabric didn't seem as apt, though 
TPUs do seem (more) apt for the implicit data structures (hashed 
quad-trees).


The new nVidia DGX concentrated TPU system for $3k is fascinating and 
triggers my thoughts (not very coherent) about the tradeoffs between 
power and entropy and "complexity".

A dive down this 1983/4 rabbit hole lead me (also) to the /Toffoli/ and 
/Fredkin Gates/ and /Reversible Computing. /More on that in a few 
billion more neural/GPT cycles...

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