Can anyone explain in an accessible way how we go from a changing pattern on a 2d grid to "add these 2 numbers" or "if x do y"?
A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#32Can anyone explain in an accessible way how we go from a changing pattern on a 2d grid to "add these 2 numbers" or "if x do y"?
Here's a nice writeup for that https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2020/digital-logic-game...
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#33Not so exciting but still pretty cool: Conways Game of Life in a few lines of otus lisp* https://github.com/yuriy-chumak/ol/blob/master/samples/Conve... * otus lisp is a descendant of owl lisp ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utOVF0U7Zd8 ) with a nice ffi - http://yuriy-chumak.github.io/ol/
I wonder when someone will code GoL inside GoL
It's already done:
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder when someone will code GoL inside GoL
Look up the OTCA metapixel.
This video doesn’t go into any detail, but is perhaps the best illustration of the concept.
Edit: yes I am late to the party.
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#35I still can't get over how much interest the game of life maintains since it's invention. It might just be my favorite "field" of CS at this point. It's such a satisfying intersection of maths, coding, "biology", and "biological engineering".
One that Conway didn't like much, saying (roughly) that it had all been explored and proved and other work of his was more interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA in this Numberphile interview with him.
This reminds me a lot of the aging rockstar who hates the billboard top 10 hit that he always gets asked to play.
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#36I knew GoL was turing complete so theoretically this should be possible. I just couldn't even imagine imagining wanting to try. So this is rather impressive.
Then you’ll be pleased to know that some crazy people worked to build an entire computer architecture using metapixels just to play Tetris: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/142673
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#37One interesting thing about this is that it serves as a kind of simplified demonstration of the kind of computation that must be occurring or could occur with actual cellular biology. DNA really seems somewhat like a tape in a Turing machine (although technically a read-only one). But the entire system does compute a result which is an organism.
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#38Shameless plug: Have some fun over possible setups of cellular-automata (which conway's game of life is a subset of): http://aperocky.com/cellular-automata/
What is special about Game Of Life? Why does it seem to be the most "interesting" cellular automaton?
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#39Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata?
I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on "bit processors" if it ran on special purpose hardware?
So instead of 64-bit processors we might have "64-cell processors" ?
Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
#40Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata? I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on "bit processors" if it ran on special purpose hardware? So instead of 64-bit processors we might have "64-cell processors" ?
You could totally design a chip that runs some cellular automata or another, but there's not much point aside from it being cool.