I found his viewpoint interesting for several reasons. First, it's hard for me not to take notice when a celebrity expresses a view on a topic that interests me strongly, particularly when the topic is fairly esoteric. Second, when this happens, I'm usually bracing myself for some misunderstanding or far-fetched extrapolation on its universal significance. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Eno may not be a mathematician, but he's played around with Life first hand. He's done some homework and knows its background reasonably well. Third, I'd like to see what an artist could do with Life after studying it at a deeper level--something that requires a little more insight than a multimedia exhibit with a random Life animation tacked on as homage to geek culture. Eno's comments give me some hope that this might happen one day.
In the exploratorium the thing that absolutely hooked me in the same way
as the Steve Reich piece had hooked me was a simple computer demonstration.
It was the first thing I'd ever seen on a computer actually, of a game invented
by an English mathematician called John Conway. The game was called Life.
Modest title for a game.
Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we're in. It only actually
has a few rules, which I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares.
You won't see the squares on the demonstration I'm about to do. And a square
can either be dead or alive. There's a live square. Here's another one.
There's another one. There's another one there.
The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the
clock, the squares are going to change statuses in some way or another.
The square which has one or zero neighbors is going to die, a live square
that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A square which has two neighbors
is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is going to give birth,
is going to come alive, if it isn't already alive. A square with four or
more neighbors is going to die of over crowding.
These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn't
produce anything very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year
finessing these simple rules. They started out much more complicated than
that. He found that those were all the rules you needed to produce something
that appeared life-like.
What I have over here, if you can now go to this Mac computer, please. I
have a little group of live squares up there. When I hit go I hope they
are going to start behaving according to those rules. There they go. I'm
sure a lot of you have seen this before. What's interesting about this is
that so much happens. The rules are very, very simple, but this little population
here will reconfigure itself, form beautiful patterns, collapse, open up
again, do all sorts of things. It will have little pieces that wander around,
like this one over here. Little things that never stop blinking, like these
ones. What is very interesting is that this is extremely sensitive to the
conditions in which you started. If I had drawn it one dot different it
would have had a totally different history. This is I think counter-intuitive.
One's intuition doesn't lead you to believe that something like this would
happen. Okay that's now settled (looking at screen), that will never
change from that. It's settled to a fixed condition. I'll just show you
another one. I'll show you this one in color because it looks nice. A little
treat. (Laughter).
At the Exploratorium, I spent literally weeks playing with this thing. Which
just goes to show how idle you can be if you're unemployed. I was so fascinated,
I wanted to train my intuition to grasp this. I wanted this to become intuitive
to me. I wanted to be able to understand this message that I'd found in
the Steve Reich piece, in the Reilly piece, in my own work, and now in this.
Very, very simple rules, clustering together, can produce very complex and
actually rather beautiful results. I wanted to do that becuase I felt that
this was the most important new idea of the time. Since then I have become
more convinced of that, and actually I hope I can partly convince you of
that tonight.
Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested
me. Almost the last actually, as well. (laughter). For many, many
years I didn't see anything else. I saw all sorts of work being done on
computers, that I thought was basically a reiteration of things that had
been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elaborate. I didn't
see many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple beginnings
and a very complex endings.
My own interest lies in the very rare patterns, ones such as the space filler, or the stable reflector. These actually run counter to the intuition one develops from watching random patterns. They push the limits of what is possible. In principle, such patterns might emerge spontaneously, but not at any remotely human scale of time or space. A lot of these patterns can't be found just by running Life, but require an exhaustive search of a large combinatorial space. The result is something with an identifiable mathematical property, often (not always) combined with a visually appealing structure or symmetry.