I tried to implement John Conway's Game of Life but with a twist. I consider the entire population as frozen, then randomly choose a single cell on which the rules of Game of Life is applied. Pick another cell in random and apply the rules to that cell, and so on. Repeat the procedure many times and see the population dynamics. I started with a randomly populated rectangle with a 10% population density.

After 10 random cells:

100

1,000

10,000

100,000

1,000,000

10,000,000

What is intelligence? Can intelligent machines be designed? Those are two questions being discussed in a 1986 book Machinery of the Mind by George Johnson I bought at a book sale in Trinoma last Sunday. Yes, the book is old but the questions being raised by the AI researchers as interviewed by the author are still intriguing and, although I haven't done an extensive research on the current status of researches in this field, I believe are still unanswered, at least not completely, up to now.

The book is amusing. For example, an artificial psychiatrist named Eliza was invented and could simulate a real psychiatrist for a short period--lking with Eliza for longer than 10 minutes will reveal its limitation. Later, a paranoiac patient, Parry, was also invented and was "diagnosed" by Eliza. Sobrang tawa talaga ako dun sa conversation nila, as told in the book.

Hindi pa talaga ako tapos sa pagbabasa; wala pa ako sa kalahati. Some of the things discussed in the book are Lisp (an AI favorite computer programming language), Turing machine, Apollo mission's moon rocks collection, Conway's Game of Life, and other AI researches up to 1984. Ano pa kaya?