Viewing profile — dvgrn

Adam P. Goucher's pi-calculator pattern is quite elegant, I'd say. It prints the decimal digits in-universe, with Conway's Life blocks for pixels. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Pi_ca…

Would you be satisfied with a Lisp implementation? https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life That shares the impressive inefficiencies of the Quest for Tetris project, though. For s…

This is one of those tricky things, highly dependent on context. If you're talking about Conway's Game of Life patterns, then "gliders" are the 5-cell spaceships that travel diagon…

> There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know... Actually more than one true replicator has been constructed. The 0E0P metacell https://conwaylife.com/wiki…

There are also patterns -- both stable patterns and oscillators -- that have an unbounded chain of predecessors, but still can't be glider constructed. That is, there are proven so…

Thanks, that's a big help! I think actually the Conway's Life community does quite regularly have "interesting things" that could fit the Show HN model. The example I'm thinking mo…

People have definitely tried this kind of thing, but so far -- from what I've seen -- Game of Life problems seem to be highly resistant to neural-net types of solutions. Take space…

I took a day off of work yesterday to try this AMA idea out, and I'm thinking it turned out pretty well all in all. It was definitely a one-time experiment, though, not something I…

Heh, I'm not actually sure whether Nathaniel meant to invoke Eric Raymond's hacker emblem on the book cover or not. The grid is there, and the glider orientation is right, but the …

I'm thinking the most successful "automated exploration" so far has been Catagolue's method: simply generate a whole lot of random-soup initial configurations, run them until they …

There's definitely plenty of material for a Volume II book (and several volumes after that, for that matter). At the moment, though, Nathaniel and I think that it might be somebody…

Definitely I have lots more to say about 15-glider universal construction! It was a really exceptionally interesting collaboration, where several people working together were able …

My sense is that people don't usually play the Immigration Game for very long -- it just doesn't seem all that interesting to most folks ... and so there hasn't been much interest …

I don't want to say that there's no possible role for AI in Life research, but it's hard to see how something like ChatGPT can be helpful. 1) The placement of a single cell in a hu…

-- It's interesting to look at the different symmetries on Catagolue, where the idea is to generate a lot of random soups with different symmetry types, and then just run those pat…

I'm not -- I'm just more of a Conway's Game of Life expert than 99.9999% of the world's population. But that's just due to experience and invested time, not cleverness. Could proba…

It's made a lot of Lifenthusiasts happy, and that's not nothing I suppose. It has also taught a lot of people a little something about the likelihood of emergence of complex behavi…

Yup, it doesn't take a very big starting pattern to produce likely infinite novelty -- though it's not always easy to prove that any given pattern won't eventually unexpectedly "go…

Ha, well, I've mostly successfully dodged the various Wolfram-science questions so far. I just finished reading a book on cosmology -- VSL theory -- but honestly a lot this kind of…

I don't know about "concise", but one place to start for references is the LifeWiki. We've been trying to extend the non-Conway's-Life part of the wiki for a few years now, to cove…

We've tried a lot of different methods over time. Currently the LifeWiki -- https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page -- is the most likely central location; any sufficiently big news …

That background seems pretty cool as it is -- I like the changing colors. Maybe try playing with depth as well, along the lines of the T=450 point of the LifeViewer demo pattern he…

The "spawn as much dots as possible" sounds like a spacefiller: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spacefiller But that's maybe a little too static for the "creating as much gliders as po…

Heh, yes, the comparison to chess is a very good one. You probably need a similar level of focus and dedication to be a good Life pattern engineer or a good chess player -- and tha…

This is a very good question, but I'm not sure I can give a very good answer. I'm not sure the "probability" part of the question is even well-defined, let alone answerable, unless…