Essay Masterclass / References
Surrounded by less than two cells, one dies of starvation.
Surrounded by two or three cells, one survives to the next generation.
Surrounded by four cells, one dies of overpopulation.
A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours is revived.
The above describes Conway’s “Game of Life”, where a single starting environment, or ‘seed’, leads to a potentially infinitely complex black-and-white gridded world.
The game is a grossly reductionist oversimplification of life, but it poses an interesting question. Do we humans, or any other organisms, truly have free will? Or are all our actions and thoughts predetermined by our surroundings? I was free to explore these questions through my self-study of psychology in high school, and hope to continue down the same path at university to find how much of our lives are dictated before we are born, and the implications of such determinism.
I press Enter.
The little green line blinks emotionlessly, flashing, unwavering.
Beneath the dimpled silver surface, electrons shuffle through a labyrinth of gold and copper. One, zero, one, zero. A string of gibberish is expelled from the metalwork, infinitely complex, yet immediately comprehensible to the machine in front of me. Something pops up on the screen.
‘Hello, world’.
Initially drawn to computers through the allure of games and movies, my current interest in the computer science lies within the logic and processes that drive algorithms and networks. I thrive in formulating the pseudocode behind a script or function, and seek to recreate the euphoria when a program finally runs after hours of debugging - as I experienced in Harvard’s CS50x and MIT’s 6.00.1x.
Ultimately, I hope to synthesise my studies in computer science and psychology to explore the feasibility and applications of AI, and compare it to the human mind.