Kind of new to this. Wondering if Conway's game of Life can really be used for real life simulations

[Con man]

Hello.
I am kind of new to this, but Conway's game of Life looks cool.

I am wondering if it can be used to simulate real life things.

For instance maybe it can be used for weather, windflow. Or maybe it could be used for some sort of AI... Any thoughts..

[Nickolas]

CGOL is a general purpose computation platform, so in that sense it can be used to simulate anything, but it's phenomenally ill-suited to modeling things in the real world. In other words, the answer to your question, practically speaking, is no.

Generally speaking, real-world modeling is done by observing a system and then describing relationships between components of that system, usually in the form of differential equations. After testing and refinement, you may end up with a set of relationships that seems to adequately model the behavior of your system, at which point you may be able to make reasonable predictions about the future evolution of similar systems.

[dvgrn]

CGOL is a general purpose computation platform, so in that sense it can be used to simulate anything, but it's phenomenally ill-suited to modeling things in the real world. In other words, the answer to your question, practically speaking, is no.

With a slightly more general form of the question -- can cellular automata (in general, not just Conway's Life) be used to simulate real life things? -- the answer is closer to "yes" ... at least it gets as far as "maybe" or "sometimes" or "sort of".

I'm thinking of various examples that are scattered around here and there -- diffusion of gas molecules, or sand piles (or water or lava or snow or what have you), or the iterative patterns that appear as seashells grow. But it does seem like a lot of times, agent-based modeling works better to get at the essence of natural systems than strict CAs can do. The real world has a lot of conservation laws, and CAs often only have those if you deliberately build them in.

[crhsxc]

Hello.
I am kind of new to this, but Conway's game of Life looks cool.

I am wondering if it can be used to simulate real life things.

For instance maybe it can be used for weather, windflow. Or maybe it could be used for some sort of AI... Any thoughts..

Since AI is developing very quickly these days, I think the answer is YES.

[Haycat2009]

Hello.
I am kind of new to this, but Conway's game of Life looks cool.

I am wondering if it can be used to simulate real life things.

For instance maybe it can be used for weather, windflow. Or maybe it could be used for some sort of AI... Any thoughts..

That is hard. You could - but there are better rules for this.