From: Anders Sandberg A Game of Life The changing blue filigree patterns on the wall-screen lit up the room and its two occupants. As they watched, the small initial pattern broke up into an irregular cloud of movement, small patterns escaping towards the edges of the screen and large globs of chaos moving around like virtual amoebas, extending pseudopodia of change, wrecking the other patterns. "Neat". The young man didn't seem impressed as he drank from the jolt can, watching the screen dispassionately. In the background the third Brandenburg symphony played on low volume. "Do you know what this is? This is Conway's Game of Life." the older woman said. She made a flick with her gloved hand, and the image zoomed in on a small crawling pattern. "But I suppose you're too young to remember it. You can't even remember the time when home computers were in monochrome and 64 kilobyte was a lot of memory, can you?" "Hey, I have seen it before. I know the rules: cells can be alive or dead. A living cell survives to the next generation if it has two or three living neighbours, otherwise it dies of loneliness or overcrowding. A dead cell comes alive if it has exactly three living neighbours". He seemed eager to prove his knowledge to her, almost too eager. "Exactly. Its a simple two-dimensional cellular automaton, much simpler than the one von Neumann used to prove that self- replication was possible. But the patterns can be extremely complex, probably more complex than anybody can know." "But I don't see why you're playing with this? Shouldn't you teach me *real* programming? Like making one of those information- hunters you use all the time?" "Sometimes, Eric, you are a misfeature in my posterior. Shut up and listen, there are plenty of things you could learn from that glider over there - at least it knows where its going." "Yeah, up and right, until it runs over the edge of the web or crashes into something". Just as he said that, the glider ran into a S- like pattern which promptly devoured it. "That was an eater. Most of the debris that appears after the game has matured consists of a few canonical, stable patterns, like blocks, blinkers, honeycombs, gliders, ponds and loaves. Sometimes more complex patterns appear, like pulsars and spaceships, and there are often some disturbances moving around when things collide. Its not that unlike reality." "You mean those patterns represent things - and people?" "Why not? The living cells are quintessence; the stable blocks and honeycombs are inert matter, the gliders and spaceships are like light or other forces and the more complex patterns are life. The analogy isn't perfect, but its not that wrong either. Perhaps this is how reality really looks like close up; a friend of mine thinks so, but he is a little bit weird anyway. Look at this!". She introduced a new pattern on the screen. "Hmm, that bouncing thing sends out a whole beam of gliders. What is it?" "A glider gun. Perhaps the Life equivalent to a node, a pattern that manages to send out quintessence somehow. We use them to make more complex patterns. You see, the gliders can be used to do lots of neat things, depending on how they collide they can bounce, annihilate, turn into blocks or other things. If I arrange a few glider guns like this..." "Wow! The gliders collided and made a new gun!" "Yes, and by aligning everything very cleverly you can build computers in the game; this pattern erases all gliders in that stream that are not prime numbers, and *this* pattern -" the image zoomed back to reveal a complex cloud of fractal globs and glider streams, filled with intricate crossings and arrays, " is exactly equivalent to a universal computer but much slower. Lots of fun." "There is a lot in those simple rules. But the real trick is making the patterns." "You're starting to understand, Eric! That is what we mages do, we change the patterns, activating or removing cells here and there in the Game of Reality. You could look at it this way, let the vertical direction represent time and the horizontal space. If I add a single cell here, nothing happens, but *here* it makes that pattern change into a block instead. Instant transmutation." "But the change moved downwards a bit, didn't it? In that case you changed history." "Yes, coincidental magick is usually about changing history slightly. Of course, once you are done, nobody can ever tell that things once were different." She gestured slightly with her thumb and a line of cells activated. A wave of activity spread from them, transmuting and destroying patterns they contacted. "And I suppose that was vulgar magick? The computer doesn't work very well anymore." "Exactly. If you change things in the wrong way things can get unpredictable. Or ugly", she added as a wave of chaos overtook a neat array of glider guns, leaving only emptiness behind. The room was plunged into darkness as the last cells died. "This is what the Nephandi wants. They would like to end the game, to erase all of creation." With a gesture, an explosion of patterns appeared again. "And this is what the Marauders would like. Complete chaos and confusion, no set history, no future, just endless possibilities." "So what does the grayfaces want? A neat grid?" "You got it. Perhaps something like that computer, but repeated forever into the past, future and outer space. Identical and efficient. Of course, we in the traditions prefer to keep an even mixture of chaos, order and emptiness to keep the game interesting." "So Ascension is when somebody manages to take over the entire game with his kind of pattern?" "Something like that. If that happens, all of history, both past and present", she gestured towards the top and bottom of the screen, "will be defined by that pattern. No other patterns can exist, they would never have existed. That's why we quarrel so much with everybody else, nobody wants to be left out of the big game but as long as there are others nobody can win." "So either we win the Game, and everybody else will never have existed, or we win or subsume them, like placing the Technocracy in a VR where they can rule over a simulated Earth? Or *we* are subsumed or annihilated." Eric looked distinctly uncomfortable, especially when he realised that it could already have happened. On the screen the emulation of a computer continued, oblivious to the world it existed in.