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What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?

Stephen Wolfram

Things are invented. Things are discovered. And somehow there’s an arc of progress that’s formed. But are there what amount to “laws of innovation” that govern that arc of progress?

There are some exponential and other laws that purport to at least measure overall quantitative aspects of progress (number of transistors on a chip; number of papers published in a year; etc.). But what about all the disparate innovations that make up the arc of progress? Do we have a systematic way to study those?

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