CGoL/CA development under the view of Historical Materialism

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
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Dylan Chen
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CGoL/CA development under the view of Historical Materialism

Post by Dylan Chen » May 11th, 2021, 12:31 am

CGoL/CA is natural math, it can exist even besides our universe. But the discovery of CGoL/CA, especially the findings, heavily rely on human intelligence, social resources, and collaborate work. Human factor plays the leading role in it.
This is a academic forum focus on the research of CGoL and CA. Maybe discussion towards research itself could better help the discovery process. I'll start with a try.

'Human resources' we have
The group portraits of Life enthusiasts may be described as: male, STEM. The wiki page shows many of them are professors or engineers lived in well developed country. In otherwise, only with outstanding intelligence and fairly good surviving environment could leave you a chance of have a wiki page. In discord we could see a bunch of energetic young man, planty of them claim having ADHD/OCD. From my personal perspective, Life ethusiasts may have larger chance encounter real-life social problems, and currently we don't know whether it is the causation to higher depression incidence rate, or the reason why we tend to be stubborn (refuse install golly or join the discord for example).

Interest driven exploring
There's no reliable, sustanable profit method in this field currently. Much of the passion of our enthusiasts, are driven by love and interest, the feeling of exploring and achieving new logical things. Consuming with human effort and computing resources,the CA exploring is not life necessity. It more like a high-end entertainment, accessible to math logic lovers. I have to say, it's the same replacement to computer game, or any other dopamine related things, though it has a cloak of science 'contribution'.

centralization and decentralize
By the development of living and education in the whole world, especially current undeveloped areas, potential life enthusiasts would slowly increase. Generally I am optimistic with the prosperity of CA research field. It also need to notice that major contribution, were made by several top genius enthusiasts. The gap between them and common guys (like me), may larger than me and my cat. Low cost massive computing power are fairly easy to obtain with cloud, making any single person able to make huge contribution. From some data, which is quantifiable, like the contribution on Catagolue, shows such 'centralization'.



Tops(leading guys) are important. I cannot image the 'CA exploring' without Golly Gang, without Nathaniel's wiki and forum, without Catagolue and ikpx.
Tools should not be the limit.
Whether your obstacle is a script, an stdin, or Linux environment computing resouces.
check New rules thread for help.

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