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Can it leave other bits behind after it moves?
By definition of a pure spaceship / glider, no it can't. If it emits persistent "exhaust" that's a "smoking ship"[0]. [0] https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Types_of_spaceships#Smoking_ship
In which direction does it glide?
Notably it only fits within a 1 cell high bounding box during at least one of its phases, not all.
I'm not a GoLtician myself but I don't think that would be possible under the "standard" rules anyway, except the trivial case of stasis/death. I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and work it belies. Congrats to those involved!
>It's still an open problem as to whether there exists a spaceship in B3/S23 which fits within a 1-by-N bounding box in one of its phases.
So they use the "typical" rule here.
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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.
This is a linear sequence of bits, which when interpreted as a Game of Life board, "prints" an exact copy of itself 2 pixels to the right (leaving no trace of the original).
I suppose its job would be easier if it only had to construct a copy of itself rather than "moving" itself, but I enjoy the interpretation that it's a linear "tape" of bits which prints its own code transposed by 2 pixels, and takes an unfathomable amount of time and space to do so. Beautiful.
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?
Of course, the "just" here does the heavy lifting and represents over two years of exploration, writing algorithms for how to clean up everything, and so on.
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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.
if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet but very interesting.
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A 1d row of cells also affects nearby cells above and below the line. Consider a row of three cells: https://parkscomputing.com/page/conways-game-of-life?boardSi... ; That produces a spinner, because the empty cells above and below the 1d row have three live cells nearby.
Yes, which is not what adzm asked for.
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…
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"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.
In our current algorithmic-obsessed era, this is reminiscent of procedural generation (but down/up the scale of complexity, not "one man's sky" style of PG).
However, we also have a long track record of seeing the world as nails for our latest hammer. The idea of an algorithm, or even computation in general, could be in reality conceptually closer to "pointy stone tool" than "ultimate substrate".