APD Week2 Play and Time

Theme: Play and Time

Context:

John Conway's Game of Life is a thing of beauty. It's considered a zero-player game and yet if evaluated against the rules of play where the meaning is created from the player submitted 'seed', the data seed is the player making meaning from the outcome, the animated growth in accordance with the rules.

The rules are simple:

If a cell is alive it will:

• Die if there are less than two living neighbours.
• Continue living if there are exactly two or three living neighbours.
• Die if there are more than three living neighbours.

If a cell is dead it will:

• Resurrect (become alive) if there are exactly three living neighbours.

Rules are from Martin Aaberge (accessed on 12 August 2020)

Method:

• It's About Time in the Game of Life

                                                                                               

  Time is subjective	Time is budget
  Time is cyclic	Time is distance

Each of the component parts: Time is budget, time is cyclic, and time is distance are explorations of the theme, play and time (time is subjective is a link to an article on time because I ran out of time before I could make it). They include explanations of the pythonic methods to generate the animated gifs. Dividing this week's activity across these four pages is a play with the interactive capabilities of the html based magistudio.net platform. Each component part includes links to other parts and back to this starting position.

Response:

The animated gif at the top of this page shows the output from one iteration of my exploration and manipulation of the game of life. The links in the table above take you to some more iterations.

Reflection:

This week I rolled around Huizinga's idea of play is connected with no material interest for no profit. Would Conway have imagined the places his genius would take artists like Brian Eno? I don't imagine he wrote the game of life for material gain, and yet, he was employed by an institution to do work, and this was one of his works. Perhaps the truth of Huizinga's idea of play is in the intent, in the expression of our humanity through play. Conway's computational expresssion of the game of life is a glorious straddling of the capabilities of the human brain and potential of artificial intelligence. With this in mind should our measure of artificial intelligence, not be how convincingly human the response, it should be through observing the playful outputs of AI technologies such as generative adversarial networks.

References:

Huizinga, J 1998, Homo ludens : a study of the play-element in culture, Reprint of the ed. 1949. edn, London.