'Life' not critical?

SIR - Bak et al. have presented evidence that the cellular automaton, the 'game of life', develops into a self-organized critical state, characterized by a D(T)^(-1.6) distribution of times T required for the lattice to return to equilibrium following a random single-site perturbation. This power law implies an infinite expected equilibration time .

[1]  P. Bak,et al.  Self-organized criticality in the 'Game of Life" , 1989, Nature.

[2]  Hwa,et al.  Dissipative transport in open systems: An investigation of self-organized criticality. , 1989, Physical review letters.

[3]  P. Bak,et al.  Self-organized criticality. , 1988, Physical review. A, General physics.

[4]  Janko Gravner,et al.  Threshold-range scaling of excitable cellular automata , 1991, patt-sol/9304001.