Langton's Ant is a simple rule-based system where an ant moves on an infinite grid, flipping tiles from white to black or vice versa. Though seemingly simple, Langton's Ant exhibits complex, unpredictable and chaotic behavior. It demonstrates that even deterministic systems can be effectively unpredictable. Langton's Ant provides an analogy for thinking about fundamental questions in physics like whether the universe is deterministic or non-deterministic, and whether a "Theory of Everything" is possible.
12. General Relativity Quantum Field Theory
Gravity
The very large and very heavy
Electromagnetism
Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force
The very small and very light
Theory of Everything?
String Theory?
M-Theory?
?
15. @dwmkerr
Christopher Langton
Academic involved in ‘cellular
automata’.
Coined the term ‘artificial life’ in the
late 80s.
Created ‘Langton’s Ant’ in 1986.
Comes with a Theory of Everything!
By Cary Herz - Santa Fe Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16781577
16. @dwmkerr
The Theory of Everything
1. The universe is an infinite plain of white tiles
2. An ant sits on a tile in the center of the universe
3. If the tile is white, the ant flips it to black, turns 90° right
and moves forwards
4. If the tile is black, the ant flips it to white, turns 90° left and
moves forwards
25. Chaos Theory
Chaotic systems are systems which are very
sensitive to their initial configuration. Even
though they are deterministic, their behaviour
is incredibly hard to predict.
A famous example is ‘The Butterfly Effect’.
47. By Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7372673
Can you write a function to produce a
random number?
49. What can the universe as code teach us?
@dwmkerr
Chaos Theory
• Our Universe is a chaotic system
• Very simple systems can have behaviour which is extraordinarily complicated to
predict
Determinism & Non-Determinism
• Non-deterministic systems are inherently unpredictable
• It is entirely possible that our universe is non-deterministic
The Theory of Everything
• The holy grail of physics, a ‘Grand Unified Theory’
• Might not tell us as much as we hope!
50. Thanks!
A lot of this stuff is on my blog and GitHub.
@dwmkerr dwmkerr.com github.com/dwmkerr linkedin.com/in/dwmkerr
Interested in the topics? Try any of the above!
https://github.com/dwmkerr/langtonsant
52. Images
- Stellar Nursery in the Eagle Nebula,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_nebula_pillars.jpg
- The formation of a Higgs Boson at the LHC,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CMS_Higgs-event.jpg
- Christopher Langton, By Cary Herz - Santa Fe Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16781577
Notes de l'éditeur
I do three things:
Advise on strategy, typical McKinsey stuff
Lead our engineering practice
A lot of coding
Lessons Learned: 2 mins
23/25 mins
You cannot simply transplant existing projects onto a platform like kubernetes and expect it to scale.
Anecdote: a week of time lost while the team try and get a complex multi-database solution working on Kubernetes, a day to run it on VMs.
Lesson: Know what works. Stateless, or self organising homogenous nodes
5m mark:
Serving clients across the world, deploying in airports, writing code.
Have to come clean on this one.
Did submit a paper on getting started with Docker.
The CFP for devops days is everything as code. So I’ve taken it literally.
The CFP for devops days is everything as code. So I’ve taken it literally.
There are four fundamental forces in the universe, that we know about. They are completely covered by two hugely successful theories. They are:
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This covers gravity; and we use it to predict and understand what happens with very large things. The picture on the left is a stellar nursery in the Eagle Nebula.
Quantum Field Theory. This covers the non-gravitational forces; and we use to the predict and understand what happens with very small things. The picture on the right is from the LHC, and shows the formation of a boson.
These theories are incredibly accurate, in that the can predict physical phenonena with a high degree of accuracy.
Relativity handles the large and heavy and takes no account of electrical interactions. It deals with planets, stars, galaxies and so on.
QFT handles the very small. It does not take into account gravity. It deals with atoms, electrons, quarks and so on.
These theories are incompatible.
Many problems cannot be dealt with if they are not all taken into account, such as the early universe (very small and very heavy).
This is what we are going to look into now.
Show the code, run it in a browser.
Show the hosted version.
In this demo ‘tick’ the universe a few cycles. Show the ant making nice, symmetric patterns.
Show the controls.
The CFP for devops days is everything as code. So I’ve taken it literally.
In this demo, run for a few hundred moves, show a more chaotic, random pattern.
Finally, show the evolution of the highway.
We have exhibited quite complex behavior.
This is strange, we built nothing in to handle highways, does this always happen?
In this demo, run the ant with different configurations, showing just how different the universe appears.
LR: forms a highway
RLR: seemingly chaotic, unknown whether a highway is formed
LLRR: forms a cardiod, growing symmetrically
RRLLLRLLLRRR: Forms an ever growing triangle
The CFP for devops days is everything as code. So I’ve taken it literally.
Let’s look at the pendulum:
1. Show the simple pendulum (Galileo Galilei (1564–1642))
2. Show the double pendulum
We had mentioned determinism in chaos theory- talking about how deterministic systems can be chaotic. What does that mean?
In this demo, run the ant, restart the ant, run the ant, restart the ant.
RRLL
In this demo, run the Rangton’s Ant, open a new tab, start a new ant, open a new tab, restart a new ant.
Relativity handles the large and heavy and takes no account of electrical interactions. It deals with planets, stars, galaxies and so on.
QFT handles the very small. It does not take into account gravity. It deals with atoms, electrons, quarks and so on.
These theories are incompatible.
Many problems cannot be dealt with if they are not all taken into account, such as the early universe (very small and very heavy).
In this demo, run the ant with different configurations, showing just how different the universe appears.
– Configuration 1
Configuration 2
Configuration 3
Projectiles, Gravity, Pendulums, Thermodynamics, Prisms and light, magnetism, pulleys.
All of these theories are practical theories, they deal with physical phenomena.
Einstein discovered the photoelectric electric effect, showing some weird things.
Radioative decay
Two slits experiment
Quantum tunneling
QED is just a theory, it doesn’t mean that this is genuinely how the universe works. But it does mean it is possible that there is randomness in the nature of the universe.
Non-determinism is surprisingly hard to deal with!
The CFP for devops days is everything as code. So I’ve taken it literally.