Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jwz.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 104 posts

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

#71

Post by Xcelerate »

waqf wrote: post #56
jules wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the case for our universe as well, for example d^2x/dt^2 due to gravity for a piece of material is dependent on all other material in the universe.

Not instantaneously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

So the Schrodinger equation isn't quite accurate then?

Does the Dirac equation take this into effect?

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

#72

Post by pests »

waqf wrote: post #34
teamls wrote: post #25

Hey guys, check out the Conway's Game of Life Code Garage project on LearnStreet: http://www.learnstreet.com/cg/simple/project/conways

I'm not logging in with Facebook to see your site, about which I know nothing, when you haven't even sold me on its relevance to the topic under discussion.

Did you, um, click the links at the top?

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

#73

Post by andolanra »

mck- wrote: post #69
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.

The general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has some interesting results (e.g. that Rule 110 is Turing-complete) but a lot of the work is summary or rehash of other extant (and often non-cited) material. There are often more thorough, more concise, and more lucid resources on cellular automata from other research; I'd cite Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) off the top of my head for a work that comes to many of Wolfram's conclusions several decades prior to Wolfram.

In fact, a good strategy for becoming familiar with cellular automata as a field is to read reviews of ANKOS by people with degrees[1], collect the works and authors mentioned, and trawl them. You'll learn a lot about a lot that way.

[1]: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html has an extensive selection of such reviews.

EDIT: It's also worthy of note here that Wolfram would reject the original post's model as not worthwhile, as ANKOS explicitly argues that we should reject continuous models in favor of discrete models; indeed, that is the very definition of his "new kind of science."

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

#76

Post by shmageggy »

jmpeax wrote: post #17

Is it Turing complete?

I'd bet it is, but I imagine it would be really hard to prove. The original turing-completeness proof [1] for discreet cellular automata worked by setting up some predictable repeating patterns and then using these to encode a representation of some other simple machine that was known to be turing-complete. Getting anything repeatable out of this would obviously be much harder, as any slight perturbation would cause unpredictable effects (see: chaos theory). However, I haven't read the paper so maybe they have some way of setting up the system that enables repeatability.

1. http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-1-1.pdf

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

#77

Post by waqf »

pests wrote: post #72
waqf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not logging in with Facebook to see your site, about which I know nothing, when you haven't even sold me on its relevance to the topic under discussion.

Did you, um, click the links at the top?

I was following a URL that apparently was supposed to go to a specific subpage, not to the site homepage. And apparently there was a loginwall in front of that subpage. What good would clicking around the site have done?

If you think I was going to read all the pages I could access on the site, so that I could ascertain whether it was worth my while to log in, then you grossly overestimate my commitment to a poorly-explained link I clicked speculatively in a comment.

Post reply on HN