Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
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Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#2Amazing accomplishment! If I didn’t know better, this could have been in the next bobiverse book!
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#3The 15 is strangely familiar.
Hypothesis: if the interaction of any pair of oscillators can theoretically be represented by a single oscillator, this could also be possible with 4 and 6 (larger) gliders, simply because (4 over 2) = 6, (6 over 2) = 15.
The above may only hold in a continuous-valued GoL, or it may not hold at all.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#4This is awesome. This result would fit perfectly well in Wolfram's NKS. The next question is... is this the minimum?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#5The 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 which has a stationary element that "tosses" a glider back and forth with a structure moving away (or towards?) it, emitting another glider in another direction after each toss, allowing for logarithmic glider/population growth. Another key idea looks to be the "glider producing switch engine" (GPSE) which incorporates the ideas of the RCT with a delay and some other logic?
The distances involved are astronomical because they're encoding everything in the distance but they still manage to make it Turing machine equivalent with only 15 gliders.
Anyway, I'm floored at the ingenuity of the GoL community. It's as close to programming with butterflies as I've ever seen [0].
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#6This 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?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#7The 15 is strangely familiar. Hypothesis: if the interaction of any pair of oscillators can theoretically be represented by a single oscillator, this could also be possible with 4 and 6 (larger) gliders, simply because (4 over 2) = 6, (6 over 2) = 15. The above may only hold in a continuous-valued GoL, or it may not hold at all.
There’s no “larger glider”. The name “glider” refers to a single specific pattern of five cells.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#8As a lay Comp Sci person I am wondering what this translates into? What implication does this have?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#9As a lay Comp Sci person I am wondering what this translates into? What implication does this have?
It's pretty cool.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#10This result is really beautiful! At the same time, it's like GoL has been conquered, and in that it leaves me a little sad. But just a little bit. Congratulations!