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Reader Help for The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul:
Corrections, Links, and Information About the Code for the Figures
If you have ideas for material to add to this page, you can email Rucker.
Here is a list of corrections to The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, ordered by page. Most of these errors were corrected in the quality paperback edition, the ones that remain in the paperback edition are marked with an asterisk *.
Page |
Correction |
1 |
Right-hand column, line 9. Replace "between one and twenty-seven" with"between one and fifty-seven". |
22 |
Caption to Figure 6, lines 1 and 2 of the caption text. Replace "prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos" with "legendary Indian mathematician Sri Ramanujan". |
| 61 | Line 2 from the bottom. Replace "Each CA has" with "Each cell has". |
| 67* | In the second row of figure 23. The graphical representation of rule 30 shown on the right is incorrect, as it simply copies the graphical representation of rule 90 on the left. The correct graphical representation of rule 30 can be found online at the Wolfram MathWorld site. |
131 |
(Figure 47 is too fuzzy.) |
164 |
Caption to Figure 58, line 3 of the caption text. Replace "matures of spots" with "mixtures of spots". |
183 |
Line 3. Replace "zero and a, with one number" with "zero and one, with a number". Note that the "a" in the replacement text is not italicized. |
| 193 | Line 17. Replace "simulations of evoluted" with "simulations of evolution". |
| 203 | Starting line 4 from the bottom. Replace "between individual parameters of the solution" with "between corresponding parameters of the solutions". |
| 206 | Line 17. Replace "that wonder about" with "that wander about". |
| 209 | Line 9. Replace "their Squidboys, singling" with "their Squidboys, and singling" |
237 |
This page is printed out of place. It should be read after the current p. 239 and before the current p 240. |
| 264 | (Figure 100 is too fuzzy.) |
| 302 | (Figure 106 is too fuzzy.) |
| 306 | Line 5. Replace "parallel mixed states" with "parallel superposed states". |
| 306 | Line 6. Replace "keeping a mixed quantum" with "keeping a superposed quantum". |
| 329 | Line 4 from the bottom. Replace "notion of subset" by "notion of which subset". |
| 348* | Line 13 from the top. Replace "we just discussed in section 5.2.[Note]116" by"we just discussed in section 5.3.[Note]14". |
| 341 | Line 5. Replace "But are other" with "But there are other". |
| 346 | Caption to Figure 114. Replace "The vertical access plots" with "The vertical axis plots". |
| 369 | Line 24. Replace "Figure 120 shows" with "Figure 121 shows". |
| 371 | Line 25. Replace "of the form L = " with "of the form N =". |
| 372 | This page is printed out of place. It should be read after the current p. 369 and before the current p.370. |
| 412 | Caption to Figure 133, line 3 of the caption text. Replace "diagram on the left shows the sit-" with "diagram on the right shows the sit-" |
| 422 | (Figure 137 is too fuzzy.) |
| 448* | In the first lines of each of the bottom two paragraphs: "For all g," should be replaced by "For all n, " |
| 464 | Last line. Replace "shaking in their air" with "shaking in the air". |
| 504 | (Displayed Schrodinger's wave equation is too fuzzy.) |
| 520 | Line 4. In the formula, replace the exponent "E" with "F". |
| 523 | Line 18. Replace "Science 291" with "Science 281". |
| 515 | Lines 18 - 19. Replace "the sum of the numbers following any '2' must be odd" with "if no '2' appears, the symbol count is even, else we find odd many non-'2' symbols before '2' and likewise after it'". |
| 524 | Line 20. Replace "social phenomenon. Find a quality" with "or social phenomenon. Find a quality". |
| 546-555 | Eliminate the skipped lines between the successive figure credit entries. Also print the figure credits in small font like the font used in the end notes. |
Ref |
Link |
The drawings are by my daughter Isabel Rucker, see her page Good I Drawing. |
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Scott and Jeanette Johnson's South Pacific video page with cone shells. |
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Page for William Gosper puzzle, with a link to his vita. |
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My son Rudy's independent San Francisco ISP, which hosts my pages. |
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Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula for extracting an arbitrary digit of pi. |
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Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” |
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Life simulators available on the Web, Life32. |
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Fredkin’s vision of the world as a CA. |
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David Griffeath’s “Primordial Soup Kitchen” website on cellular automata. |
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Jack Wisdom’s online pages about Chaotic Evolution of the Solar System. |
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Walker on when when Venus and Mercury would, when viewed from Earth, ever both appear to cross or “transit” our Sun’s disk at the same time. |
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John Cramer, “The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”. |
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My writing notes for As Above So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. |
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The august and geekly Jargon File (which mentions “wetware”). |
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Random Boolean networks Java applet by Torstein Reil. |
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Brindle cow picture in the Turing archives. |
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Information about Turing’s work on morphogenesis. |
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Walker argues computational intelligence results not just from having a class four process, but from also having a lot of rapidly accessible and stable memory. |
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The L system flower sequence online. |
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Research/bmv/vmm-deluxe/Plates.html |
Art by David Povilaitis. |
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Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe.” |
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Rudy Rucker, Software Engineering and Computer Games page. |
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Face-recognition example from Tom M. Mitchell, Machine Learning. |
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Mirek Wojtowicz MCell cellular automata software. |
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The American big-number-naming convention vs. less common European convention. |
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Vinge’s talk “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”. |
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html |
Nick Herbert, “Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra”. |
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Rudy Rucker, Frek and the Elixir notes. |
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Lucas’s ripostes to objections, “A paper read to the Turing Conference at Brighton on April 6th, 1990.” |
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Boppers software. |
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Craig Reynolds flocking applets and a Java driven tutorial on flocking and other kinds of steering behaviors. |
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Reynolds C++ code for steering behaviors and includes, for instance, a great simulation of pedestrians in motion. |
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“Transrealism”, my term for somewhat autobiographical science fiction. |
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/transrealistmanifesto.pdf |
Albert-László Barabási website. |
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My Mandelbrot set film script. |
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Numerical example of Zipf’s law by scientist Jamie Callan of the University of Massachusetts. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20001005120011/hobart.cs.umass.edu/~allan/cs646-f97/char_of_text.html. |
The mother of all Zipf’s law web pages, see Wentian Li’s site. |
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Lada A. Adamic, Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a Ranking Tutorial. |
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/ranking.html |
Yakov Zeldovich rule generalized by Damián Zanette and Susanna Manrubia. |
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B. Malamud, G. Morein, and D. Turcotte, “Forest Fires: An Example of Self-Organized Critical Behavior,”PowerPoint version. |
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Dscussion of the forest fires paper. |
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The Forest Fire Java applet. |
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Rudy’s drawings of many futuristic inventions on the Saucer Wisdom web site. |
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Richard Shore, “Conjectures and Questions from Gerald Sacks’s Degrees of Unsolvability”. |
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Scott Aaronson’s website, “The Complexity Zoo”. |
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Life32 for Windows by Johan Bontes. |
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John Kollen and Jordan Pollack, “Back Propagation is Sensitive to Initial Conditions,” Complex Systems. |
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David Eppstein’s website summarizes some the known facts about the difficulty of various commonly played games. |
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Gottfried Leibniz, C.I. Gerhardt, ed., Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, parts translated by the British philosopher George MacDonald Ross |
http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/modern/leibniz/analysis/analysis.html |
A lovely interview with Andrew Wiles appeared on the TV show Nova; the transcript . |
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Greg Chaitin’s home page. |
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Martin Gardner, “Science and the Unknowable”, Skeptical Inquirer. |
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n6_v22/ai_21275519 |
Many of the computer-graphical were made by loading parameter files into Cellab, Capow, Boppers, or Chaos; see the Software Downloads page to get these programs. You want to have the 2005 version of Capow.
Figure |
How the Image Was Made |
Chapter One Header |
The image bars at the heads of the six chapters were all generated using Capow. For these images the world is tweaked to be (for reasons relating to the book design) 534 pixels wide, wrapping around from left to right. Chapter One uses an image gotten by loading the "1D Discrete Tree.CA". This is a radius-one sixteen-state rule which is symmetric in the sense that mirror-image neighborhoods produce the same behavior. I found it by using the search features of Capow. |
8 |
Boppers with the parameter file "BOIDCAGE.BL". |
9 |
Chaos program "MANDEL.BAT". |
10 |
Cellab with the parameter file "VOTE.JC". |
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