Thomas M. Gaul

Intrinsic Viability in the Game of Life

Spring 2024 to Spring 2025


This project sought to derive, for the first time, the intrinsic viability constraint of an emergent individual. All previous work on viability has employed extrinsic viability constraints to understand when a system dies and/or is no longer functional. An extrinsic constraint involves placing fixed bounds on the state space of a system; on can then analyse how the underlying dynamics of the system – which are independent of the constraint – behave in relation to it. Thus, what determines viability in the extrinsic case is decided by the observer, even if implicitly. On the other hand, an intrinsic constraint is derived from the individual directly. This is done by defining a system’s organization and then deriving the complete space of its possible realizations.

We used the glider in the Game of Life as a toy model to carry out this derivation. This constraint has many interesting properties that challenge common ideas about viability throughout the literature on autopoiesis and enaction.

The original code used for this project is available in this Github repository. An updated and improved version is avaiable in this Gitlab repository.


Relevant Publications