dossier · Gianni Pojani
About
This is the notebook of Gianni Pojani. I write here about cellular automata, complex systems, computational complexity, and technology strange enough to feel like it came from somewhere else.
Why it looks like this
The field behind every page is a live cellular automaton: 2D grid, 8-neighbour rules, computed by a shader on your GPU. The home page seeds it with the number 137 and leaves it to take the number apart. Click to drop a glider. Shift-click to plant a Gosper glider gun. Drag to paint. Press P to pause and 1–4 to switch between Conway’s Life, HighLife, Day & Night and Anneal.
The instrument panel in the corner reports the colony’s block entropy: the Shannon entropy of every 2×2 neighbourhood, normalised to 1. It’s a cheap, honest way to watch a system move between order (near 0), noise (near 1) and the interesting part in between.
Each post has its own sigil. It’s a one-dimensional elementary automaton whose rule and first row both come from a hash of the title. Each one belongs to its title and can be regrown from the title alone.
Why 137
Rule 137 is Rule 110 with black and white swapped, and Rule 110 is Turing-complete. So the smallest rule table you can write down, eight bits, is enough to run any computation there is. It’s also, not by accident, a nod to 1/137, the fine-structure constant.
The zoo
Posts are filed by complexity class, not by tag:
- P: quick and direct.
- NP: hard to find, easy to check.
- PSPACE: games and long strategies.
- EXP: deep dives that got out of hand.
- RE: questions that may never halt.