This is awesome. This result would fit perfectly well in Wolfram's NKS. The next question is... is this the minimum?
Can it construct itself as some giant spaceship / oscillator?
Well, no idea.
Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
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Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#12Hi there, I'm the author (of the blog post, not of the achievement itself)! So glad this is spreading. Feel free to ask here or on the post for more clarification if stuff is too unclear
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#13This is awesome. This result would fit perfectly well in Wolfram's NKS. The next question is... is this the minimum?
Can it construct itself as some giant spaceship / oscillator?
It can! A seed constellation for the initial gliders would be possible using the extra debris from the original collision. Without using that debris, there might be a problem reaching far enough without adding extra bits that each double the amount of reaching to get to the right starting point. So I think would be a specialized recipe for a couple reasons.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#14The basic idea is to use the distance of the gliders to encode information, so when they hit each other allows for an embedding of a Turing machine. I'm no expert here but some basic ideas are that some small number of gliders (two?) can hit each other and produce a "glider gun", allowing for just a few gliders to "upgrade" to producing a steady stream of gliders. There's a "Reverse Caber Tosser" (RCT) structure whic…
I might have my books mixed up but I believe this idea was a subplot in one of David Brin's early books, The Practice Effect. First Edition: 1984.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#15Amazing work!
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#16Hi there, I'm the author (of the blog post, not of the achievement itself)! So glad this is spreading. Feel free to ask here or on the post for more clarification if stuff is too unclear
How much of advanced GoL is intuition and genius you were born with and how much is math/logic anyone can learn with enough time?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#17Do we have any idea / intuition about what proportion of patterns are build-able?
If not on an infinite grid, then some subset (i.e. 100% of 1x1 patterns are build-able, 80% of 3x3 patterns, 60% of 5x5 patterns, etc.)
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#18Hi there, I'm the author (of the blog post, not of the achievement itself)! So glad this is spreading. Feel free to ask here or on the post for more clarification if stuff is too unclear
How much of advanced GoL is intuition and genius you were born with and how much is math/logic anyone can learn with enough time?
Definitely worth trying to learn!
As with most topics, it starts out seeming hard to grasp, and then you start naming things and recognizing them. What looks like jargon to an outsider is just a compressed way of communicating. The people in the community are smart and tend to compress their ideas really far which makes the jargon even more extreme.
Advanced gol is just getting past that first hurdle of understanding the densely compressed info behind the jargon. And it doesn't ever need to be done for all of the concepts. You can be versed in just one. I started out in a super specialized corner in self constructing spaceships. That said I'm a bit of a whiz in other areas so I can't be used as evidence that it works for everyone..
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#19The basic idea is to use the distance of the gliders to encode information, so when they hit each other allows for an embedding of a Turing machine. I'm no expert here but some basic ideas are that some small number of gliders (two?) can hit each other and produce a "glider gun", allowing for just a few gliders to "upgrade" to producing a steady stream of gliders. There's a "Reverse Caber Tosser" (RCT) structure whic…
I might have my books mixed up but I believe this idea was a subplot in one of David Brin's early books, The Practice Effect. First Edition: 1984.
Might it have been Glory Season?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#20Do we have any idea / intuition about what proportion of patterns are build-able? If not on an infinite grid, then some subset (i.e. 100% of 1x1 patterns are build-able, 80% of 3x3 patterns, 60% of 5x5 patterns, etc.)
This is a really good and not at all easy to answer question. The most I can say is that folks earlier this year used some SAT solver equivalent to find notable patterns that cannot be constructed - including a still life and an oscillator https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unsynthesizable_oscillator_1. This doesn't have much bearing on the probability of constructability for an arbitrary large pattern.