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

1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

conwaylife.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#121

Post by gnabgib »

NuclearPM wrote: post #120
Someone wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. I think people will disagree about whether “Turing-complete” is powerful enough for supporting intelligence but let’s assume it does. > So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign? Even if it doesn’t, it might take only o…

What’s up with the upside down question mark?

It's an interrogative in Spanish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside-down_question_and_excla...

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#122

Post by Legend2440 »

jacquesm wrote: post #94
chuckadams wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram is kind of obsessed with cellular automata, even went and wrote a whole book about them titled "A New Kind of Science". The reception to it was a bit mixed. CA are Turing-complete, so yeah, you can compute anything with them, I'm just not sure that in itself leads to any greater Revealed Truths. Does make for some fun visualizations though.

The question really ultimately resolves to whether the universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with god, because I would see that as proof of all of this being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being makes me hope that it is analog.

Computation does not necessarily need to be quantized and discrete; there are fully continuous models of computation, like ODEs or continuous cellular automata.

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#123

Post by triggercut »

7373737373 wrote: post #48

Two of the most fascinating open questions about the Game of Life are in my opinion: 1. What is the behavior of Conway's Game of Life when the initial position is random? Paraphrasing Boris Bukh's comment on the post linked below, the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with su…

3. Could it generate it's own GoL forum asking these very questions?

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#124

Post by mycall »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #30
flufluflufluffy wrote: post #17

Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don’t quite understand what exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more… The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary…

Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive amounts of time and brain power to this.

Same with Your World of Text [0], still going strong.

[0] https://www.yourworldoftext.com/

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#125

Post by jacquesm »

Legend2440 wrote: post #122
jacquesm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question really ultimately resolves to whether the universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with god, because I would see that as proof of all of this being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being makes me hope that it is analog.

Computation does not necessarily need to be quantized and discrete; there are fully continuous models of computation, like ODEs or continuous cellular automata.

That's true, but we already know that a bunch of stuff about the universe is quantized. The question is whether or not that holds true for everything or rather not. And all 'fully continuous models of computation' in the end rely on a representation that is a quantized approximation of an ideal. In other words: any practical implementation of such a model that does not end up being a noise generator or an oscillator and that can be used for reliable computation is - as far as I know - based on some quantized model, and then there are still the cells themselves (arguably quanta) and their location (usually on a grid, but you could use a continuous representation for that as well). Now, 23 or 52 bits (depending on the size of the float representation you use for the 'continuous' values) is a lot, but it is not actually continuous. That's an analog concept and you can't really implement that concept with a fidelity high enough on a digital computer.

You could do it on an analog computer but then you'd be into the noise very quickly.

In theory you can, but in practice this is super hard to do.

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#126

Post by nerevarthelame »

herodoturtle wrote: post #15

Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.

This video is a great overview of spaceships\gliders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yLcsaewxJQ

The level of engineering necessary to do this in 1 dimension is still beyond me, as is the "simple" explanation posted on the Conway forums. But I feel like I appreciate the achievement a little bit more now.

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#127

Post by alphager »

NuclearPM wrote: post #120
Someone wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. I think people will disagree about whether “Turing-complete” is powerful enough for supporting intelligence but let’s assume it does. > So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign? Even if it doesn’t, it might take only o…

What’s up with the upside down question mark?

Typical for Spanish speakers

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#128

Post by scotty79 »

pkilgore wrote: post #13

So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line? That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here. Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!

Thank you for this description. I thought it's a glider for some 1 dimensional cellular automata system.

Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#130

Post by pdpi »

tombert wrote: post #78
IncreasePosts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive amounts of time and brain power to this.

I think it appeals to the same itch that languages like Brainfuck scratch. There's something exceedingly interesting about how you can model complexity with something extremely simple. Brainfuck is fun because it forces you to think extremely low level, because ultimately it is basically just a raw implementation of a Turing machine. I wouldn't want to write a big program in it, but it is fun to think about how you m…

I have a weird love for Brainfuck. It's a tiny, incredibly simple language that you can write an interpreter for in an hour, it's effectively a super-simple byte code that can easily be extended and used as a compilation target for simple languages.

Honestly, as an educational tool, the only thing wrong with it is the name!

Post reply on HN