i can't possibly be the only one who didn't get what this is
Hint: zoom out.
Recursive Game of Life
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#32WOW
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#33Wow! At the speed of around 0.15 you can see all the relevant computations:
Every few seconds three glider triples get sent out, obviously directly representing the 9 neighboring cells. These interact with some lane shifting and 90 degree reflections. In the process these "byte" may lose a glider or two, representing the result of the game of life computation. Then you can see a fuse burn down, then a single glider makes a round and suddenly the whole cell switches state by an army of gliders gently touching the producing border.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this part is very clever and quite well-done IMHO. I suspect the trick is to only store the state for any levels you've actually seen. As you go higher, they can just arbitrarily select a location in the simulation a few levels up from where you are that is consistent with the metapixels you've seen; once you go up a few levels, there's no chance of you having seen beyond a very small window of the simulation,…
Need they do any simulation? I would need paper and some time, but can’t you store 16 animations of a cell and then just have the state as a zoom level, position in x y space (wrapping) and a time (in a loop). The rest should be calculatable assuming this is a true fractal which I think it is. 0 zoom is probably the starting position. Zooming in actually switches to maximally zoomed out with each cell following the p…
Yes, you’re right on the state: the state for each level can just be OTCA timestep and x,y within the parent level. However, I think you need to store somewhat more than 2^4 animations: there are 35328 cycles per OTCA tick, and a cell’s animation depends on all of its neighbors, for something like 2^9 * 35328 distinct states. The vast majority of cells are quite predictable (and have short animation periods) but some of the logic elements will change in somewhat unpredictable ways. There is likely to be some fancy compression that can be done if the states need to be computed ahead-of-time.
Some of the more subtle bits do depend on the neighbor cells in the parent level, so I think there still does need to be some simulation done to ensure that these subtle bits are correct when viewing lower levels. But that only needs it be done in a small neighborhood.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#35This is awesome. How would one describe this formal system? There are no cells essentially
There are cells, but they are not atomic but decomposeable.
Each cell in level N is the stable pattern of gliders arranged into a square shape in the lower level N-1. If you think about it, this is how "objects" in the real world exist - not as an essence of the object, but as a pattern of simpler elements arranged in space-time that we recognize as an object.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#36I LOVE how you can set it to scroll forever by itself. This website is a true work of art.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#37Loading...
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#38This is really great. I would like to use it as a visual backdrop on a big screen when playing DJ sets. I see that it enters a permanently zooming out mode when I zoom out fast, would be awesome if the zoom control disappears when it enters that mode so that it just displays the game of life itself and no UI elements.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Need they do any simulation? I would need paper and some time, but can’t you store 16 animations of a cell and then just have the state as a zoom level, position in x y space (wrapping) and a time (in a loop). The rest should be calculatable assuming this is a true fractal which I think it is. 0 zoom is probably the starting position. Zooming in actually switches to maximally zoomed out with each cell following the p…
Yes, you’re right on the state: the state for each level can just be OTCA timestep and x,y within the parent level. However, I think you need to store somewhat more than 2^4 animations: there are 35328 cycles per OTCA tick, and a cell’s animation depends on all of its neighbors, for something like 2^9 * 35328 distinct states. The vast majority of cells are quite predictable (and have short animation periods) but some…
Interesting, I guess I forgot that the game of life includes edge neighbors and had no idea of the cycle time. Why isn’t it 2^8 neighbors though?. Maybe just running 2^8 simulations is the way to go? Or that’s 9 megabytes * frame size per so maybe that ends up being small enough with compression
Edit: the author has said that it’s non periodic apparently which seems like it would make this whole thing a lot harder and probably require more state
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#40While an interesting effect, this recursive nature of this game can not be seen unless one has a mouse scroll wheel. I think it would be good to allow zoom in/zoom out to be done a different way (such as page up/page down or +/-). Not everyone has a mouse scroll wheel.