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

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161–170 of 223 posts

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

#161
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sma…

> If your underlying system is linear and stable

Sure, but that 'If' isn't true for all but the simplest analog systems. Non-linearities are present in the most unexpected places and just about every system can be made to oscillate.

That's the whole reason digital won out: not because we can't make analog computers but because it is impossible to make analog computers beyond a certain level of complexity if you want deterministic behavior. Of course with LLMs we're throwing all of that gain overboard again but the basic premise still holds: if you don't quantize you drown in an accumulation of noise.

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

#162
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/sample…

One of my favorite calculations of pi is to pick random coordinates in a unit square and count how many of them are in a circle. it's so stupid and so clever at the same time.

This was recreated from memory. I think it is close but I may have a bounding bug.

    import random

    def pi(count):
      inside = 0
      for i in range(count):
        test_x = random.random() 
        test_y = random.random()
        if test_x ** 2 + test_y ** 2 

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

#163

> The start is slow as well, skipping to generation 42168M is recomended. I picture entities playing with our universe, "it starts slow but check it out at the 13.8B mark"

Philosophically and depending on what schools of thought you follow, reality is just a really complex GoL simulation. I'm sure I read about it once, but if we were living in a simulation, would we be able to know?

Universe could be probability based GoL simulation; basic Turing machine cannot handle that

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

#164
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it's not "game of life jargon", it's "cellular automata" jargon. Which is a field of math and comes along with a bunch of math jargon from related fields.

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.

conwaylife.com isn't just for GOL, although it is the main subject, there is an Other Cellular Automata forum. also it's not really a fansite, it's a bit more academic than what would be considered a "fansite".

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

#165

Oh my god, it's a Quine! 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…

yeah, spaceships are pretty common (fun fact: 2 spaceships were found on the same day including this one in GOL), also in CA it's called a "spaceship". However until now there was no 1D one (1D is also called 1-cell-thick or linear). Also, you are actually wrong, it is actually much easier to move than to self-synthesize and then remain alive like a replicator. There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know (arguably, linear propagator may be a replicator) but like millions of spaceships have been found.

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

#166

> The start is slow as well, skipping to generation 42168M is recomended. I picture entities playing with our universe, "it starts slow but check it out at the 13.8B mark"

Philosophically and depending on what schools of thought you follow, reality is just a really complex GoL simulation. I'm sure I read about it once, but if we were living in a simulation, would we be able to know?

I think of reality as of GOL but 3D, with more states other than 0 and 1, and conservative (follows conservation laws, no relation with any politics).

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their free book "Conway’s Game of Life: Mathematics and Construction" is a great starting point - https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf

You sent me down a rabbit hole: https://esolangs.org/wiki/APGsembly is mentioned in the book

And for a related rabbit hole where people actually went all the to the bottom, there's of course the full implementation of Tetris in GoL which was nerd-sniped by a CodeGolf challenge

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

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

#169
post #41

1D spaceship* glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship

Their own wiki points out they're sometimes used interchangably. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship

and the source linked by that wiki https://conwaylife.com/ref/lexicon/lex_g.htm#glider claims it as misuse

it's like calling all birds a parrot

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

#170

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…

in an infinite plane, if we keep adding random points ( similar to sun continuously giving earth low entropy energy ) , eventually, it will reach to intelligent life form, which are very efficient at converting low entropy energy to high entropy energy.

This would require patterns to emerge that are "radiation-hardened", like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Radiation-ha...
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