Owen -
Thanks for this sweet oddity. I heard of it "back in the day" but never
looked closely. By that time CA had lost some of their cachet in the
community. The CA encoding of the Ants and Turmites *is* particularly
motivated IMO... that the complexity of the "ground" is lower than the
complexity of the "agent", but both are very simple and relate directly
to eachother.
Last time I talked to Chris was on the steps at St. Johns... maybe
1999!?! Last I heard he was in Sausalito or Marin living on a
houseboat or a sailboat, but that was at least third hand and now years
stale.
I met Chris in 1983 when he first presented his Loops
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_loops> at the CA conference in
Los Alamos
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01672789/10/1>. That was
an amazing pivotal moment, that conference. Was anyone else in that
world at the time? It was mostly "young turks" (Packard, Farmer,
Toffolli, Wolfram, HIllis, Burks, Crutchfield, Margolus) with a few of
the "seasoned veterans" (Ed Fredkin, Forrest Carter, JH Conway, et al)
and tweeners like Stu Kauffman and Bill Gosper. I of course, had no
idea where I was at the time, I was so busy spinning around trying to
absorb it all! I was a total outsider.
My own contribution
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167278984902598> at
the time, along with Stuart Hameroff,
<http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/> could have been a *lot* more
informed by Carter's work in molecular computing, but somehow I missed
that until later when Feynman gave his "plenty of room at the bottom"
lecture at LANL the next year...
- Steve
Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant
.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)
Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI
in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like
to. Any recommended readings?
-- Owen
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