Transcriber: Gloria Trejo Reviewer: Emma Gon
Great. We’re going to talk today about the game of Metalife.
So what if Conway’s game of life had multiple dimensions
with multiple life forms,
and your life forms could compete in a metallife simulator
evolving into playable game worlds,
solving hard problems in computer science,
and fundamental problems in physics,
bridging physical and virtual,
until we settle [in] other worlds?
Well, let's walk through a little more slowly
and talk about how that would happen.
So starting off in the beginning,
Conway’s game of life is a famous problem,
and it involves cellular automata
that are evolving in a 2D environment with very fixed rules,
and you can play forward the number of computational steps
and see the evolving patterns,
it’s been a fascinating concept for a long time,
as well as a hot topic in a kind of computer science.
If you start applying that into multiple dimensions,
you get cubes that are effectively around at a 3D level.
You have 26 cubes that are surrounding the primary,
and depending on the rule sets that you use about which live and die,
you can get very interesting fractal type structures.
When you allow multiple life forms to exist side by side,
they can effectively compete for resources
or for which is the most beautiful,
which is the most interesting various types of interactions.
Now you can also go one step further
and then basically have them compete in a sort of a multiplayer arena
where different people can submit their own life forms
and see how far and what happens to them under different types of circumstances.
By the way, we’ve built all of this, this is currently a C-sharp Godot version.
What we’re seeing now is the pure JavaScript version,
which is a 3D immersive version of the same thing.
And in it you can actually submit your own functions,
you can submit your lambda calculus things,
and basically see under which circumstances they will evolve.
They can mutate.
They can have varied types of kind of interactions that happen
when they come in contact with each other,
either absorbing a different life form,
sharing genetic information,
and other things of that nature.
And you can play it forward an arbitrary number of computational steps.
Now, this gets even more interesting when we bring it over into Unreal Engine,
which then basically turns it into a playable game world.
So your whole environment in the game world can effectively be
the product of a cellular out automata built kind of game world
in which various elements of it can not only be evolved
and producing a particular circumstance, but can be dynamically evolving around you
as you’re playing the game and interacting with you.
This can also solve potential hard problems in computer science
because, as some people know,
there is a sort of unsolved problem from the early era of universal constructors.
And that basically is instead of looking at a computer as a bot
or kind of contemporarily with Turing Machines
as a constructor that can effectively construct itself.
And now with Web3 architecture, we effectively can do that
because the organism or life form in fact can create its own currency,
secure its own computational resources, etc.
It can also go and solve fundamental problems in physics.
And what we’re currently working on with the Wolfram Institute
is taking a concept of meta mathematics or the rule sets
which effectively bind mathematics together
and doing a similar thing for physics, taking an environment
and saying “what are all the possible physics rules
that could exist in a particular environment?”
And then toggling them, potentially procedurally generating them,
creating some form of randomness to see which physics rules persist and coexist
and make kind of interesting output and even playable, interactable worlds.
This, among other things, allows us to bridge physical and virtual.
So this piece that you’re looking at now
is the embodiment of a hyperbolic space
built by a mathematician and architect,
that was originally done in a virtual world.
Space, in fact, is procedurally generated,
that then is becoming a physical object,
and you can interact with it in a virtual world context.
You can kind of fly around, experience it,
but you can also come to Burning Man and explore the physical object.
And I think maybe this is the best way that we get to settling other worlds,
among other things, because we can experiment
at the edges of what we know about physics.
We may actually discover various new things that allow us to,
among other things, get to Mars faster or get to Mars at all.
And this is another ongoing sort of collaboration
that we have with some kind of NASA people, data science, etc.,
to figure out how do we simulate
the actual physics of other worlds and other dimensions.
And credits go to both the Metametaverse team,
Peter Suber at Harvard for his nomic things,
the Wolfram Institute, Arthur Mamou-Mani who built the hyperbolic temple,
and Von Neumann for his original work on Universal Constructors.
Thank you.