There have been a lot of "wow" moments in my Life career, watching complexity emerge out of the repeated application of simple rules -- but I guess I'd say that it was more a confirmation of things that I thought I knew already.
In 2001 I had already been playing around with things like the Mandelbrot set and aperiodic tilings and Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops for quite a few years, so I knew the kinds of magical things that the iterative application of simple rules could produce.
In 2001 I had already been playing around with things like the Mandelbrot set and aperiodic tilings and Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops for quite a few years, so I knew the kinds of magical things that the iterative application of simple rules could produce.