Self-organization toward criticality in the game of life

Life seems to be at the border between order and chaos. The Game of Life, which is a cellular automaton to mimic life, also lies at the transition between ordered and chaotic structures. Kauffman recently suggested that the organizations at the edge of chaos may be the characteristic target of selection for systems able to coordinate complex tasks and adapt. In this paper, we present the idea of perpetual disequilibration proposed by Gunji and others as a general principle governing self-organization of complex systems towards the critical state lying at the border of order and chaos. The rule for the Game of Life has the minimum degree of perpetual disequilibrium among 2¹⁸ rules of the class to which it belongs.