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Conway's Game of Life, in real life

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Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#31

Post by zabzonk »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #28
self_awareness wrote: post #13

That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.

Does make me wonder if it's possible to make a physical / analog / mechanical version of Game of Life. fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...

sure is - i made one using poker chips and a chessboard - i had to do the computations using my own brain though :-(

https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#33

Post by ordu »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #26

Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make. Now that would be simulating life witg life.

Well, people can die if they have too many or too little of neighbors, but they can't be summoned from a thin air if they have just enough neighbors. Hard to simulate life with people. Though if you are ready for a simulation step of 20 years or so... But it still may not work, because you need people of two opposing sexes and compatible genders near the empty sell to fill it. In Game of Life all cells are hermaphrodites.

But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#36

Post by tmountain »

mittermayr wrote: post #32

Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.

Personally, I can barely stomach reading LLM writing. I find myself closing lots of articles after a sentence or two. I wonder how this plays out longer-term regarding engagement.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#37

Post by lproven »

abcd_f wrote: post #23
cjfd wrote: post #20

When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.

And who didn't do that! :) You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).

> And who didn't do that! :)

Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.

A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.

So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.

I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#39

Post by Lerc »

mittermayr wrote: post #32

Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.

I have not felt that it was becoming rare. Certainly on platforms like YouTube you can see automated processes cranking blandness at scale. I haven't found it encroaching on the topics that interest me like toy electronic projects, how some ancient game rendered its Sprites, colour space analysis, or a compiler that fits in a tweet,

I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.

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