#JuarreroBook Ch. 6 Interlude: Game of Life

We’ve had problems seeing what we're meant to be seeing in the book's examples. This week we drifted off to one of our own, Conway's Game of Life. I'd like to continue a bit with that. GoL is fascinating, and helpful in contexts such as ours, see web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DCDRealPatterns1991.pdf

So can it give us informative examples of constraints? Here 3 examples for discussion

1) general mathematical relationships that express possibilities/impossibilities with respect to patterns in GoL. These seem analogous to the threshold for connectedness in J's button example (we didn't reach a definite conclusion on that..)

2) variants changing topology and/or synchronicity of updating, please see here arxiv.org/pdf/nlin/0405061

these seem possible examples of 'context' and 'constraint' to me. The way I'm seeing these is as external to the fundamental entities (squares) and their interaction rules. None of that has changed. But tweaking the temporal synchrony of updating, or having 'gaps' in the topology, alters the possibility space/the behaviour of GoL

So how would we describe these? (in what way) are they 'real'? are they causal or causal like? what explanatory role do they play? are they context dependent or independent constraints?

3) (now hypothetical) Imagine there were timing or topology parameters that made glider guns much more likely (instead of the "labyrinth pattern"). Would this be an "enabling constraint"? Would we be missing something without such a notion (by just continuing to point to the individual squares and rule set)? Are glider guns a ‘whole’ that we need for explanation etc?

[discussion on GoL started here: social.sunet.se/@dcm/112372763988712787]