On an episode of ID the Future, Robert Marks and Winston Ewert of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab discuss three of their recently published papers dealing with evolutionary informatics, algorithmic specified complexity, and how information makes evolution work.

Download the episode by clicking here:

Conway's Game of Life, not to be confused with the board game pictured at the top of this post, is played on a rectangular grid. Cells live or die depending on the cells that surround them. Hobbyists have designed highly complex and interesting patterns using Conway's four simple rules of birth, death, and survival. Patterns include oscillators, spaceships, and glider guns. Dr. Ewert explains how the theory of algorithmic specified complexity can be applied to measure, in bits, the degree to which these cellular automata life forms are designed.

The discussion centers around a peer-reviewed journal article that you can find here. This is the second of three segments. Find the first here.

Image credit: 松岡明芳 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.