Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of 'Game of Life'
Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on his screen. They pulsed, grew and blossomed into monarch butterflies. As the two butterflies grew, they smashed into each other, and one got the worst of it; its wing withered away. But just as it seemed like a goner, the mutilated butterfly did a kind of backflip and grew a new wing like a salamander regrowing a lost leg. Mordvintsev, a research scientist at Google in Zurich, had not deliberately bred his virtual butterflies to regenerate