Hello, colony

This is the first entry in a notebook about systems where simple local rules produce global behaviour nobody wrote down: cellular automata, networks, markets, brains, proofs. It’s also about the theory of how hard things are to compute, and about technology odd enough to feel alien.

A few conventions:

• Posts are filed by complexity class, not tag. P is quick. RE may never halt. The zoo explains the rest.
• Every post has a sigil, a small one-dimensional automaton grown from its title. Hover over a card on the home page to see it run.
• The background is alive. It’s a real Game of Life running in your browser, not a video. Click it.

A system is complex when you can’t predict what it does any faster than by letting it run.

That’s close to the working definition here. The posts that follow are me trying to run things.