A researcher built a language model using a 2D grid of cellular automata where information flows through local cell-to-cell interactions without attention mechanisms. Testing on a small fox-themed corpus, the model achieved low cross-entropy but struggled with repetition, and analysis showed information propagation was limited by the local communication constraint.
A science writer explores chaotic phenomena and deterministic systems that produce random-like behavior, discussing the Lorenz water wheel, the distinction between genuine quantum indeterminacy and classical chaos, and plans for tabletop experiments to observe complex dynamics like convection plumes.