So far, my personal profile, icon and Fast Rewind center more or less around one thing: trying to make sense of the chaos in the world in logic, reasoning and algorithms. And exactly how elegantly simple having an inclination to structure can be, is presented by cellular automata. I first learned about cellular automata by reading the aptly named book The Computational Beauty of Nature, by Gary William Flake. This book is required reading for all Artificial Intelligence students at Utrecht University and is used in the course Introduction to Adaptive Systems. It shows us how everything we see can usually be reduced to patterns. From the way flocks of birds behave to recursive patterns in certain types of broccoli. Cellular automata model this by modelling initial chaos by very simple rules. A giant grid is created by code. Each cell in this grid has two possible contrastive colors, for example (black, white). The cell is surrounded by eight other cells - as is normal in a grid. Based on the number of cells that are a certain color, the color of the cell either changes or stays the same. Just like in Mathematical Anarchy, patterns start to occur in the chaos. Patterns that are often quite beautiful to look at and that do, represent the computational beauty of, maybe not nature, but of chaos.
This brings me to the way this work could inspire future work. I'd like to start by stating that it is merely the concept that speaks to me and inspires me. The work itself added no real additional features to the original Conway's Game of Life, published in 1970, or any of its successors. Interactive cellular automata have been around for a very long time. This inspires me to go a step further. Cellular automata could be used to represent actual behaviour, for example. Visitors of the expo could be part of the experience without even knowing it, by simply moving around. Just like people are generally unaware of the role their actions have in the greater scheme of things, since one does not generally walk around thinking about actions and decisions that consciously. Another interesting question could be posed based on by background in policy and concerns privacy. Do the subjects start behaving differently when knowing they are continuously part of an artwork? And how long does this effect last? This type of work could use art to lead to some very interesting research about human behaviour under supervision. That could lead not only to policy insights, but also to insights about the Hawthorne Effect in science.