Essay

As an undergrad I opened ‘General System Theory’ expecting the ultimate design principle, and found biology instead. Half a century ago Bertalanffy said life is not matter but organization — and Lenia proves it on a computer.

In 1990, my father bought a computer for his five-year-old son.

One man argued that language was a matter of reward and habit, and lost famously. Half a century later, the machines that talk to us are trained with exactly that: reward.