Fungussy Philosophy

I'd better get started on this personal philosophy thingy! I'll start off by boring you all stiff about the Fungus Simulator. It's a computer program I've been working on, on-and-off, for... A few years actually. Blimey.

It's based on a well-known idea, which involves a grid of virtual "cells" that can be either "alive" or "dead". The cells live or die depending on a very simple set of known rules. Thus, they produce mesmerising patterns of complex-looking activity, which some say resembles life itself. I initially thought it resembled fungus, hence my program's ridiculous name.

Very recently, I found that the original idea is called "Conway's Game of Life"—not to be confused with the board game—and realised that, in my ignorance, I have made my Fungus Simulator notably different from Conway's game.

My simulator applies one set of rules that determines whether a cell lives, but Conway's game uses two; one for whether a cell comes alive and another for whether a cell dies. This crucial distinction means that my program is currently unable to emulate Conway's, although I think I could build "Conway completeness" into a future version.

This is not to say that my simulator is entirely inferior to Conway's game. On the contrary, my simulator allows the user to customise the rules, whereas Conway's rules (expressed in my own words) are fixed as follows:

• Any dead cell that has exactly three living neighbours comes to life.
• Any living cell that does not have exactly two or three living neighbours dies.
• All other cells remain unchanged. (I consider this rule to be implied, therefore I don't call it "Rule Three".)

The reason why I am writing about programming here is because, through my own personal experience, I have seen how a few simple rules can result in amazing and complex structures. No doubt some of you have spotted that Conway's Game of Life is a metaphor for the theory of Evolution, which is a big issue in debates about theological Creation.