Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
[Eun's lab]

Eun's animation gets implemented on the screen. It cycles through once, the swastikas rotating counter-clockwise for equal amount of time as they did clockwise. Then the animation stops and the line is lifted apart from drawing. New glyphs appear on it, indicating directionality, from left to right. Both swastikas briefly morph into a different symbol, which sort-of looks like a basic glider pattern in the cellular automaton.

The animation restarts, both swastikas spinning clockwise, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across a dimension. When the left swastika breaks, the animation stops, and the swastikas briefly morph into two different symbols - the intact one is still a glider, but the broken one is now an empty square. The counter-clockwise animation begins, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across the dimension has reversed directionality.

The animation keeps repeating, going back and forth. It's shrunk slightly to fit another drawing under it. It's a small swastika outside a large circle. In the middle of the circle is a large glider symbol. The swastika begins rolling clockwise around the circle, growing bigger for the first quarter, shrinking slightly for the second and falling apart during the third. An empty square appears next to a line representing the broken swastika. Then, two larger swastikas arrive from the left. They briefly touch each other and a dot appears above the right one. They complete the last quarter of the circle, and then the dot drops on the circle, becomes a new small swastika, and the entire thing begins again.
[Eun's Lab]

Eun takes the glider to be the machine's way of saying "signal", given that's what it does within the context of the automaton. More abstractly, it probably represents speech or data and the like. She's not sure what to make of the first half of the animation, or just what is implied by that, but she can't see how it could mean anything else.

The second half seems like an abstract representation of a basic life cycle, though. Entity is born, matures, withers, and dies, only to be replaced by the offspring of two other, unrelated entities, to begin the cycle again.

All of this around the glider. Maybe... maybe the glider is meant to represent "life"? That would make some amount of sense. Following that, a square probably represents "dead", given that it continually takes the place of broken swatikas. It also makes sense within the context of the automaton; four cells in a square pattern is stable and unchanging, just as she'd chosen to represent "dead" earlier.

Eun decides to try a more proactive approach to learning this machine's vocabulary. She runs a small experiment, setting up three swatikas; one is rotating clockwise slowly, a glider glyph underneath it. Opposite it is a broken swastika, with an empty square beneath it. And between the two is a swastika that simply isn't moving, with a conspicuous blank spot under it. If she's right, she's hoping to prompt the computer into telling her its symbol for "Idle" or "Asleep". If that works, she'll keep going through similar experiments until she has a basic, 200-or-so vocabulary for communicating with the computer.