A couple of weeks ago, me and my Neo4j Breakfast Club friends were just freewheeling our way into the day, and one of my colleagues started talking to me about Conway's Game of Life.. I had never heard of this thing, but was immediately fascinated. It basically allows you to simulate evolution in a rudimentary and simplified kind of way, but it's really fascinating how it works based on a very simple set of rules (see below). There's an entire Wiki dedicated just to this "game" - it's one of the most wonderful rabbitholes on the web that I have ever seen. Just take a look at this example and you will see the idea in action:
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
So when I heard about it, I immediately thought that it would be a ton of fun to run this experiment in Neo4j. Why? Because the rules are all about connections between members of a population. Things will evolve - or not - based on their connectivity.