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comment by ilex
ilex  ·  1644 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stephen Wolfram - Announcing the Rule 30 Prize

There are lots of things that are "patterns that humans created" -- that doesn't necessarily make them uninteresting. There certainly ought to be space for personal curiosity in mathematics! Sometimes it's just fun to ask questions and solve problems.

But also, cellular automata (and fractals) have a lot of relationship with dynamic "chaotic" systems which exist all over the place and are notoriously difficult to understand. This includes physical systems (which sometimes humans tend to be great at controlling, but explaining how to do it to a computer is devilishly tricky), quantum computing, and machine learning things.