One of the recurrent themes I noticed in the article, as well as throughout our class discussions, is the concept of free will. I recently found an interesting ‘proof’ concerning free will. Surprisingly enough, it was written by our friend, John Conway. Although I have not completely internalized the ‘proof’, I am a bit skeptical of it. Moreover, there seem to be problems with the axioms used and assumptions made. Regardless, Conway attempts to show that “if there exist experimenters with (some) free will, then elementary particles also have (some) free will.” I’m hoping this ‘proof’ stirs up some interesting discussion. As for Langton’s Ant, I am a bit curious as to how Langton discovered this interesting case. It takes roughly 10,000 frames before the ant begins to ‘build the road’. Was it just ‘chance’ that Langton happened to watch the system evolve that long? Why didn’t he stop after 100 frames? 1,000 frames? Could this imply that given any seemingly complex system, order will eventually arise given that we ‘watch’ long enough? Furthermore, could the mere act of observation affect the outcome of certain systems? I guess this somewhat goes hand in hand with Conway’s ‘proof’. If we watch a system of elementary particles, will they behave independently of their pasts? Or will they act in such a way as to comply with what we expect?