The game of life as a species model

Abstract

Conway's classic game of life is a two-dimensional cellular automaton in which each cell is alive or dead and evolves according to simple rules that depend solely on the number of live cells in its immediate neighborhood. The emergence of complex multi-cellular objects provides a fascinating vehicle for exploration. A variant of the classic game of life is presented, the generalized semi-classical game of life, in which each cell contains a qubit that evolves by repeated application of birth, death, and survival operators. Species are characterized by just two parameters: a preferred neighborhood liveness representing the tendency to herd and a resilience parameter representing species' vulnerability to environmental changes. This generalized model provides the opportunity to model the fortune of species and to compare to available data. The model is shown to mimic environmental catastrophes and is illustrated by the model's prediction of a return to the pre-hunting level of the global whale population by 2140. A student-designed predator–prey model is shown to qualitatively describe the fate of strongly- and weakly coupled predator–prey systems (snowshoe hare/lynx and rabbit/fox, respectively) and sudden and slow predatory impact (dodo and diprotodon, respectively).