Caledonian: It doesn’t need to be a simple sum. What I meant was maybe something a bit more abstract. Perhaps something with some form of “directionality”, analogous to momentum, such that different sections can cancel out.
Or maybe some more abstract property, perhaps some completely non local property that turns out to be conserved. Again, I’m not saying there is such a property in Life, merely that it’s not obvious to me that there isn’t, and that as far as I know, Noether’s theorem doesn’t apply to this sort of system.
(If I’m wrong about the last, well, someone lemme know? :))
Caledonian: It doesn’t need to be a simple sum. What I meant was maybe something a bit more abstract. Perhaps something with some form of “directionality”, analogous to momentum, such that different sections can cancel out.
Or maybe some more abstract property, perhaps some completely non local property that turns out to be conserved. Again, I’m not saying there is such a property in Life, merely that it’s not obvious to me that there isn’t, and that as far as I know, Noether’s theorem doesn’t apply to this sort of system.
(If I’m wrong about the last, well, someone lemme know? :))