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Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

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Re: Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

#62

Post by ghostfish »

jashkenas wrote: post #47

Does anyone have a JavaScript implementation of the paper? It looks like it would be really fun to play with in . Edit Quoth YouTube: "74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460" ... maybe not so fun.

But you missed the most important part of that quote. >"(in Ready, Stephan's software at the sourceforge link above runs much faster)" So using Ready it took a long time, but the actual code is much faster. I'd imagine you could write something in CUDA that would run this (and only this, not something generalized like Ready) plenty fast to do real time rendering on a new system, especially considering a GTX 680 has almost 5x the horsepower of a GTX 460.

Admittedly not in a web browser though.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

#63

Post by tim_hutton »

ghostfish wrote: post #62
jashkenas wrote: post #47

Does anyone have a JavaScript implementation of the paper? It looks like it would be really fun to play with in . Edit Quoth YouTube: "74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460" ... maybe not so fun.

But you missed the most important part of that quote. >"(in Ready, Stephan's software at the sourceforge link above runs much faster)" So using Ready it took a long time, but the actual code is much faster. I'd imagine you could write something in CUDA that would run this (and only this, not something generalized like Ready) plenty fast to do real time rendering on a new system, especially considering a GTX 680 has a…

Ready is using OpenCL. But Stephan is using FFT for the convolution with a disk filter, which is a big win for large radii.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

#66

Post by ghostfish »

tim_hutton wrote: post #63
ghostfish wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you missed the most important part of that quote. >"(in Ready, Stephan's software at the sourceforge link above runs much faster)" So using Ready it took a long time, but the actual code is much faster. I'd imagine you could write something in CUDA that would run this (and only this, not something generalized like Ready) plenty fast to do real time rendering on a new system, especially considering a GTX 680 has a…

Ready is using OpenCL. But Stephan is using FFT for the convolution with a disk filter, which is a big win for large radii.

As far as I'm aware OpenCL performance, while portable, is still somewhat inferior to that of straight CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs, hence my CUDA suggestion. I didn't actually look at the algorithms used in either so I can't comment, perhaps I'll do that tomorrow. What do you mean by using an FFT "for" a convolution? The algorithm is convolving the (presumably 2D) FFT of the game board with a disk filter?

Re: Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

#67

Post by DanBC »

mikeash wrote: post #60
DanBC wrote: post #40

Pinchyfingers submitted this link: ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628 ) which goes to a Youtube video of a game of life in a single line of APL. It's a really nice description of the code too. (It's a sale pitch for dynalog - but the best kind where they're just using the tool to do something neat and not pushing their URLs at you.)

I've watched that video several times and it never occurred to me that it was a sales pitch.

That's the best kind of sales pitch. Don't sell it. Just show it. People who want it will be grateful not to have it pushed at them, and people who don't want it will watch it and share it with others, and those other people might want it.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

#69

Post by mck- »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #68

Watching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is more worthy of study. There was so much controversy about the book and Wolfram's claims, that I didn't bother with it.

Watching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is getting old (like Tetris).

I was actually reading that book at the book store for hours, getting quite intrigued, but at the same time deterred by its size. Perhaps I should give it another shot some day.

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