It's Much Easier for Neural Networks to learn Game of Life Dynamics with the Right Activation Function: Polynomial Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Previous work has found a gap between the scale of neural networks that reliably learn Conway's Game of Life, and minimal networks capable of representing the classic cellular automaton with hard-coded parameter values. Viewing neural network learning as a search process suggests a dependence on networks large enough to contain sub-networks with lucky initializations (sometimes known as 'winning tickets') that actually learn the task. In this work, we reorient our perspective from discovering Life rules as a search problem back to a learning problem, and reason that with fitting inductive biases, the problem should be much more amenable to minimal networks. We find that network variants w...
| Authors | Tashin Ahmed, Q. Tyrell Davis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 22 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.