A fascinating demonstration of the power of emergence: Simulating cells fighting to the death.

"Superficially, this is just a cute simulation of some artificial cells, but, for me, it gets at one of the deep wonders of life.

These cells exhibit high-level 'purposeful' behavior, but their motion is entirely driven by extremely simple low-level rules (and they're not even deterministic!).

Just like in a real organism - just like in us, science believes - this purposeful behavior emerges from the interaction of many pseudorandom low-level components.

These cells were not programmed via top-down rules, as one might code a video game enemy (walk towards player, move limbs while doing so, fire when X feet away, etc.); their high-level behavior emerges fully from the bottom up."