Better Decisions Through Data.
Mandelbrot set: fractal math. After spending some time in space, we wanted to come back down to Earth. Continuing on our previous photos, should we talk about Conquistador economics or the invention of writing and 3,000 year-old Chinese sunspot observations? First let’s talk about von Neumann machines and cellular automatons. This is the famous Mandelbrot set, an image generated from pure mathematics. There are an infinite number of beautiful images inside the Mandelbrot set.
The Mandelbrot set isn’t normally constructed as a cellular automaton (although it certainly can be as cellular automatons are Turing-complete for the computer scientists out there.) However, many other famous fractals are easily expressed as cellular automatons. The two fields are closely related, as many fractals (including Mandelbrot) are related to bifurcation problems on recursive functions (famously related to automaton simulations). We’ll just note for now that Cellular Automatons are another name for von Neumann machines, which you may remember from Arthur C. Clarke’s and Peter Hyams’s classic science fiction film 2010 as the monoliths that reproduced to turn Jupiter into a sun. Going back to our post on the singularity, there are two artificial intelligences in the films: HAL (who turns evil in 2001) and the alien monoliths benevolently shaping humankind’s destiny. (Clarke used machines — monoliths — because his adviser, Carl Sagan, hero of our last 3 IG posts, thought it would be more realistic not to depict actual aliens.) There are yet additional connections between our past photo topics and cellular automatons. What are they?
Photo credit: Wikimedia/Wolfgangbeyer/CC-BY-SA-3
A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.
[…] our discussion of fractals, digital physics, self-replicating spacecraft, cellular automatons, and von N…, this is view of a different part of the Mandelbrot Set (produced with a different viewer). Answer […]
[…] This is Mandel, a version of RepRap. RepRap is an open source hardware project to build a fully self-replicating 3D printer. That’s right, a 3D printer that can print a copy of itself. We’ve discussed the concept of self-replicating machines previously in posts on cellular automata. […]
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