Terence Tao

But you can design all kinds of interesting configurations inside it.

There's something called a glider gun that does nothing but spit out gliders one at a time.

And then after a lot of effort, people managed to create AND gates and OR gates for gliders.

Like there's this massive, ridiculous structure, which if you have a stream of gliders coming in here and a stream of gliders coming in here, then you may produce extreme gliders coming out.

If both of the streams have gliders, then there'll be an output stream.

But if only one of them does, then nothing comes out.

So they could build something like that.

And once you could build these basic gates, then just from software engineering, you can build almost anything.

You can build a Turing machine.

I mean, it's like an enormous steampunk type things.

They look ridiculous, but then people also generated self-replicating objects in the game of life.

A massive machine, a binomial machine, which over a huge period of time, and it always looked like glider guns inside doing these very steampunk calculations, it would create another version of itself,

which could replicate.

It's so incredible.

A lot of this was like community crowdsourced by like amateur mathematicians, actually.

So I knew about that work.

And so that is part of what inspired me to propose the same thing with Navier-Stokes.

Now it was a much, as I said, analog is much worse than digital.

Like it's going to be,

You can't just directly take the constructions from the game of life and plunk them in.