Still, I’ve always found it tantalizing that Leibniz seemed to conclude that the “best of all possible worlds” is the one “having the greatest variety of phenomena from the smallest number of principles”. And indeed, in the prehistory of my work on A New Kind of Science, when I first started formulating and studying one-dimensional cellular automata in 1981, I considered naming them “polymones”—but at the last minute got cold feet when I got confused again about monads.
