One thing that particular piques my interest is the diversity of possible automata, not just forms in any particular one, but diversity of rule sets as well.
What do you think is special about the GOL rule set compared to other life-like rules?
Do you think it was a historical accident this particular rule set became so famous, or not?
Are there alternatives you are also interested in?
It was _kind of_ a historical accident, in the sense that if we ran history over again, it wouldn't be too surprising to see an alternate-history "Conway's Life" with a rule like "B36/S23" (HighLife) instead of "B3/S23". (Conway did really like the replicator and bomber and a few other fun things that HighLife has that Life doesn't.)
On the other hand, Conway had some very specific criteria for the rule he was looking for. "B3/S23" is about as simple a set of rules as you can find for a range-1 Moore-neighborhood outer totalistic cellular automaton on a square grid.
So unless Conway's eye had happened to get caught by some slightly more complicated rule before he and his team happened on B3/S23, he'd be quite likely to settle on "B3/S23" all over again. It's one of the few candidates for the simplest rule that does obviously interesting things and seems likely to allow for computational universality. I mean, there are untold numbers of equally promising rules in larger rulespaces like the "isotropic non-totalistic" rules
... but most of those have rulestrings like "B2ci3ai4c8/S02ae3eijkq4iz5ar6i7e":
it's just not anywhere near as simple to describe the rules, as it is for Life.
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If we meet up with an alien civilization some day, it would be extremely amusing if we happened to show them some Life patterns and they said (in so many words) "Hey! You know about Pnurflpeef's Game of Life?!?" Not a likely scenario, by any means, but not quite impossible either.
I'm no plant surgeon, but this is correct. Many plants host symbiotic microorganism ecologies in their root system. Usually they help with pre-processing key nutrients (mainly nitrogen) to make it easier for the plant to absorb, and they take a little food out of the roots in return.
By the same token, plants convert carbon into fruit, which animals eat and then metabolize back into CO2. At the end of the day, all of a plant's captured carbon will return to the ecosystem one way or another. Most of the time, anyway.
I thought it was because apes fight by grabbing and tearing, so with that evolutionary pressure applied you basically end up with the minimum effective protrusion.
Also, this is why I plan to avoid fighting apes or at least try to wear some good pants if I do.
You may be right. If there was a selective pressure against large penises due to intra-male fighting, and the lack of a strong enough pressure for larger penises (due to the relative absence of pair-bonding), that would support the observation that gorilla penises are small. For humans, where that sort of fighting doesn't happen, and where pair-bonding is important, penis size would naturally drift upwards until they become too big, or they take too much energy to grow/utilize.
One way to test this would be analyze the fighting techniques of various primate species, and then bin them based on their penis size and relative monogamy. If all primates that grab and tear have small penis, irrespective of their pair-bonding, then perhaps the former is more important.
What makes temperature induced die off significant is that they’re essentially instantaneous: any part of the reef that exceeds some critical temperature dies completely and immediately. The core problem is the temperature increases are far faster than can be grown away from.
Acidification is slower but persistent and inescapable. It attacks existing coral and prevents new growth.
> any part of the reef that exceeds some critical temperature dies completely and immediately.
Typically exceeding CTmax results in bleaching, the expulsion of symbiotic microalgae from the animal polyps, and there is a window of weeks to months in which they will return if temperatures decrease. In the terrible Great Barrier Reef bleaching years of the past decade where individual reefs were facing near complete bleaching, many have made full recoveries.
Worth noting coral reefs are highly diverse, even with very high mortality of corals there are crustose coralline algaes and other habitat building species still at work so the reef doesn't die completely, and 'weedier' coral species start ecological succession quickly.
To your point though these are novel and trying times for low latitude reefs, at least historically speaking.
One thing that particular piques my interest is the diversity of possible automata, not just forms in any particular one, but diversity of rule sets as well.
What do you think is special about the GOL rule set compared to other life-like rules?
Do you think it was a historical accident this particular rule set became so famous, or not?
Are there alternatives you are also interested in?