#emergent complexity

Every 5 generations:

Every other generation:

Every generation:

EDIT: there was a mistake in the code, using modulo 9 in all cases meant state 9 will never emerge. Fixing it later...

Here's how it works: The state of each cell determines the size of the neighborhood it will look at. State 0 looks at itself and the cell directly to the right (state 0 can't have neighborhood size 0 or no cells could be born). State 1 looks at itself and the next two cells, state 2 itself and the next three cells, and so on. To determine the next state, sum all the cells in the neighborhood, divide by 9 and keep the remainder.

Here's what it looks like:

It looks mostly green because I used yellow, yellow-geeen and green as states and they all sort of blend together.

I ran it again, this time color coding for even and odd, but still (almost) no patterns emerged:

When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are…

Here's how it works: