Month: November 2020

The Constraints of Life

Playing Conway’s Game of Life is an easy way to spend an afternoon. The game is based on the concept of cellular automatons; essentially, it consists of a grid of cells where each cell can be either on or off (also referred to as alive or dead), and at each time step each cell updates …

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On the Shoulders of Giants

A couple hundred thousand years ago, our species reached a point where we could pass knowledge directly (through language and demonstrated action), rather than relying on adaptations to be passed on through genes. With this shift, culture was born – and it allowed us to very rapidly acquire a great deal of knowledge about our …

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