A Teasingly Suggestive Parable

Consider the evolution of the nearest-neighbor one-dimensional cellular automata rule RllO, starting from a random initial state. A few early steps of a sample evolution are shown in figure 12.11. 

Forget for a moment that you know that figure 12.11 shows the space-time pattern due to a well defined local deterministic rule, and that the underlying universe really consists of nothing but bits. Suppose you are told only that this figure represents some sort of alien physics, and that you may see as many different samples of this alien world s behavior as you wish. How are you to make any sense of what is really going on  

Depending on how many different samples of behavior you have the patience to analyze (and other factors, some of which, such as how representative the initial states in these samples are of the set of all possible initial states, may be beyond your control), you may or may not get a fairly complete picture of what kinds of objects exist and what sorts of interactions are allowed in this one-dimensional alien universe. At worst, you will grow tired long before you have had the chance to record even a small fraction of the total number of possible states in this world. 

At best, you will have a long (and likely still incomplete) list of particles and their interactions. What you almost assuredly will not have, is any idea that the underlying physics really consists of a single - very simple - local deterministic nde that acts on the real particles that are the fixed sites of a lattice taking on the values 0 or 1. How different is this alien two-dimensional world from our own  

While our impassioned parable is admittedly naive, it is also the most straightforward depi( tioii of the heartfelt idea that maybe - just maybe - there is something much, much simpler than what we normally think of as fundamental physics lurking on tinier, Planck-longth, scales. The question is whether this much simpler something owes anything to CA-like formalisms. 

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