Turing machine gives order to chaotic Penrose universe

Turing machine gives order to chaotic Penrose universe: The scientists constructed logic gates for their universal Turing machine by assigning one of eight different states to each Penrose tile, with the states changing over time according to a few simple rules.

Tiles in the first state act as wires that transmit signals between the logic gates, with the signal itself consisting of either a "front" or "back" state. Four other states manage the redirecting of the signal within the logic gates, while the final state is simply an unused background to keep the various states separate.

At first it wasn't clear whether Imai's team would be able to keep their logic gates wired together, as the gates can only appear in certain places where the tiles come together in the right way.

However, the team found that a long enough wire would always make the connection, proving that a universal Turing machine is possible in the Penrose universe...

 Imai didn't know about the Penrose glider at the time, so he was forced to take an alternative approach.

First gliders navigate ever-changing Penrose universe

First gliders navigate ever-changing Penrose universe: Now Life enthusiast Adam Goucher has discovered a glider in an aperiodic cellular automaton. Unlike the regular-gridded surface of Life, Goucher's world is a mish-mash of two types of rhombus that completely cover the two-dimensional plane without ever repeating their arrangement. This ever-changing surface is known as a Penrose tiling, after the mathematician Roger Penrose who first dreamed it up. It was seen as a death sentence for gliders: one irregularity could cause the pattern to disappear or veer off-course and loop back on itself...

Goucher's Penrose glider looks quite different – "ribbons" of rhombi keep the glider on a straight line, while a "head" and "tail" give it a sense of direction. This allows it to move through the aperiodic Penrose landscape on an infinite, straight path – the defining feature of a glider.
Goucher's Penrose universe is also vastly more complicated than Life and has several incarnations: in the version featured above, the cells take one of four possible states – shown as different colours, rather than just "live" or "dead".

First Conservation Laws Derived For A Virtual Universe - Technology Review

First Conservation Laws Derived For A Virtual Universe - Technology Review: The climax of Toffoli and Capobianco's paper is their demonstration that energy can only be conserved if the space-time is invariant, that all directions and times in this Ising Universe are essentially equivalent.
In this way, they show how a Noether-like theorem can apply in a discrete universe.
That's hugely significant. It means that the same rules of symmetry that have been powerfully applied to modern physics can also apply to the many new disciplines that are beginning to exploit discrete models.

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist: "The 'offspring' is identical to its parent, but it has shifted up and slightly to the left - another first for Life: every other known pattern moves along one of the eight compass points, but Gemini travels across the grid in a north by north-west direction."