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

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

#131

Post by willrshansen »

__del__ wrote: post #101
tombert wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

for those who think brainfuck is too pedestrian, have a browse through the esolang wiki: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

I remain utterly baffled how they made a lisp compiler with malbolge

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

#132

Post by eru »

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've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to.

Writing a naive CGOL is fun and quick. But writing a _fast_ one can get arbitrarily complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife is one particular example of where you can go for a faster-than-naive CGOL.

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

#133

Post by eru »

tombert wrote: post #113
jachee wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Assembly?

Assembly is higher level logic than brainfuck, especially on modern chips. You have built in instructions for arithmetic and conditionals/branches and you can allocate memory and point to it. You don’t really get any of that with brainfuck. You have a theoretical tape and counters and that’s basically it.

SKI calculus is pretty neat, too. You get no tape, no counters. (But it's not quite as bad to program in as brainfuck, because you can built more ergonomic contraptions to help you along.)

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

#134

Post by eru »

_alternator_ wrote: post #114
azeirah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch. It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points: - "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to complexity when iterated upon - The invention of f…

I would give the same review, without seeing any of this as a positive. NKS was bloviating, grandiose, repetitive, and shallow. The fact that Wolfram himself didn’t show that CA were Turing complete when most theoretical computer scientists would say “it’s obvious, and not that interesting” kinda disproves his whole point about him being an under appreciated genius. Shrug.

That CA in general were Turing complete is 'obvious'. What was novel is that Wolfram's employee proved something like Turing completeness for a 1d CA with two states and only three cells total in the neighbourhood.

I say something-like-Turing completeness, because it requires a very specially prepared tape to work that makes it a bit borderline. (But please look it up properly, this is all from memory.)

Having said all that, the result is a nice optimisation / upper bound on how little you need in terms of CA to get Turing completeness, but I agree that philosophically nothing much changes compared to having to use a slightly more complicated CA to get to Turing completeness.

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

#135

Post by eru »

jacquesm wrote: post #125
Legend2440 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your underlying system is linear and stable, you can pick any arbitrary precision you are interested in and compute all future behaviour to that precision on a digital computer.

Btw, quantum mechanics is both linear and stable--and even deterministic. Admittedly it's a bit of a mystery how the observed chaotic nature of eg Newtonian billard balls emerges from quantum mechanics.

'Stable' in this case means that small perturbations in the input only lead to small perturbations in the output. You can insert your favourite epsilon-delta formalisation of that concept, if you wish.

To get back to the meat of your comment:

You can simulate such a stable system 'lazily'. Ie you simulate it with any given fixed precision at first, and (only) when someone zooms in to have a closer look at a specific part, you increase the precision of the numbers in your simulation. (Thanks to the finite speed of light, you might even get away with only re-simulating that part of your system with higher fidelity. But I'm not quite sure.)

Remember those fractal explorers like Fractint that used to be all the rage: they were digital at heart---obviously---but you could zoom in arbitrarily as if they had infinite continuous precision.

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

#136

Post by eru »

gaigalas wrote: post #117
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.

"It looks designed" means nothing. It could be our ignorance at play (we have a long proven track record of being ignorant about how things work).

Yes. Or it could be an optimisation algorithm like evolution.

Or even just lots and lots of variation and some process selecting which one we focus our attention one. Compare the anthropic principle.

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

#137

Post by eru »

IAmBroom wrote: post #72
dooglius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched several of these terms and they are all specifically jargon of game of life enthusiasts, (i.e. search reaults are all on fansites related to game of life) not general cellular automata jargon.

I assume there's fanfic shipping of automata... (If you don't recognize that use of "shipping", don't google it at work.)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Shipping should be reasonably safe for work. As long as you can avoid getting sucked in to an all-day wiki bender.

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

#138

Post by brightly-salty »

tombert wrote: post #104
__del__ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for those who think brainfuck is too pedestrian, have a browse through the esolang wiki: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

I have no idea how I'd be able to pitch this to a university (or even who I could pitch it to), but I would absolutely love to teach a computability course using Brainfuck as the language, just to really show students how low-level logic can be. I would probably need to find a similar language with a different name though.

You might find mlatu-6[0] interesting- it’s convertible to SKI calculus but concatenative (like Forth) rather than applicative. It’s actually a subset of Mlatu, a language I created for similar reasons to explore “how low can you go.”

[0]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Mlatu-6

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

#139

Post by Isamu »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #71

Can someone who knows a bit more about this help me understand how structures like this are produced? Is there some kind of computer search, perhaps guided? Is this a clever combination of sub-structures, timing mechanisms, etc. that are then fit together like Legos?

I believe this one is a deliberate construction, they knew the evolution of the pieces and gradually put it together.

There’s search programs too, for smaller patterns. This construction is just too big and with such a long period. The search space would be enormous.

I got involved in this stuff years ago when I modified a search program for Life to search any CA rule. That’s how we found the HighLife rule and others like Day and Night.

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

#140

Post by Izkata »

optimalsolver wrote: post #105
__del__ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for those who think brainfuck is too pedestrian, have a browse through the esolang wiki: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

StupidStackLanguage is by far my favorite: https://esolangs.org/wiki/StupidStackLanguage

Piet is mine - the programs are 2D images: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

Primarily because of the note on the "calculating pi" example program:

> Richard Mitton supplies this amazing program which calculates an approximation of pi... literally by dividing a circular area by the radius twice.

> Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program.

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

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