alt Hacker NewsI actually think this is just computer science. Why? Because the first "computer scientist" - Alan Turing - was interested in this exact same set of ideas.
The first programs he wrote for the Atlas and the Mark II ("the Baby"), seem to have been focused on a theory he had around how animals got their markings.
They look a little to me (as a non-expert in these areas, and reading them in a museum over about 15 minutes, not doing a deep analysis), like a primitive form of cellular automata algorithm. From the scrawls on the print outs, it's possible that he was playing with the space of algorithms not just the algorithms themselves.
It might be worth going back and looking at that early work he did and seeing it through this lens.
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I think this is 'Reaction-diffusion models'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys...
The idea iiuc, is that pattern formation in animals depends on molecules diffusing through the growing system (the body) and reacting where the waves of molecules overlap.
Alan Turing is FAR from the first computer scientist, though, if we want to be pedantic
Right. is "the basic science of what simple rules do" not the same as Formal systems?
It is generative functions. Wolfram is grifting again.
By the same argument, it's mathematics because John Conway was a mathematician, and it's physics because Ulam and Von Neumann were physicists.