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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

#171

Post by dvgrn »

HTHThreee wrote: post #165
sethaurus wrote: post #145

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 f…

> There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know...

Actually more than one true replicator has been constructed. The 0E0P metacell

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell

can be programmed to self-replicate in any number of ways, but it's so big that it's very hard to simulate it through a full cycle. By contrast, Pavel Grankovskiy's "DOGun SaGaQR"

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=138191#p13819...

only has one pattern of replication, but it's much simpler than the 0E0P metacell and can easily be run through many cycles in Golly.

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

#172

Post by jmsgwd »

Someone wrote: post #66
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…

> 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…

> it might take only one intelligent life form for the space to (eventually) get filled with it

It wouldn't need to be intelligent to do this; it could be a self-replicating machine with no intelligence at all - which is orders of magnitude simpler and therefore more likely.

Chaotic initial state -> self-replicating machine -> intelligence is much more likely than chaotic initial state -> intelligence.

(See my other reply to the GP comment about The Recursive Universe, where all this is discussed.)

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

jmsgwd wrote: post #75
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…

Your first question is discussed in the book The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (1984). One of the chapters asks "what is life?". It considers (and rejects) various options, and finally settles upon a definition based on Von Neumann-style self-replicating machines using blueprints and universal constructors, and explains why this is the most (only?) meaningful definition of life. Later, it talks about how o…

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by dvgrn »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #169
rtkwe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is one of those tricky things, highly dependent on context.

If you're talking about Conway's Game of Life patterns, then "gliders" are the 5-cell spaceships that travel diagonally, and all other moving things are "spaceships" but not "gliders". If you call a Conway's Life non-glider spaceship a "glider" you'll mostly just confuse people.

But if you're talking about other CA rules -- especially rules where there isn't any 5-cell diagonal spaceship -- then "glider" is very commonly used to refer to other moving patterns.

For example, David Eppstein's "Gliders in Life-Like Cellular Automata" database was active for decades -- recording spaceships across a large rulespace, not just Conway's Life. It's an accepted generalization of the term, somewhat like saying "Xerox machine" for any old copying machine whether or not it was built by Xerox.

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

#175

Post by idiotsecant »

falcor84 wrote: post #168
jancurn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder how it is that you get to exist in the same world as people with the drive and intelligence to do truly awesome ( in the original sense) thing like this. I am proud of myself when the compiler works on the first try.

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

#177

Post by dvgrn »

kbelder wrote: post #108

I'm beginning to think a FORTH coded in GOL is within our reach.

Would you be satisfied with a Lisp implementation?

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life

That shares the impressive inefficiencies of the Quest for Tetris project, though. For something that's much more practical to run, and can be programmed to do things like print out the digits of pi in-universe, see

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/APGsembly

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

#178

Post by Jaxan »

londons_explore wrote: post #24

This seems like a great task as a test for AI. The result is easily verify-able, yet the techniques to design such a glider are very complex and some might not have been discovered yet.

“Easily verifiable”… Not really, you have to simulate 133_076_755_768 steps. Sure it’s doable. But if the AI suggests a thousands patterns, then it will be useless.

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

#179

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

somat wrote: post #162
Izkata wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure about a bounding bug, but there's definitely an indent error on the return line (good old Python!)

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

#180

Post by kevincox »

scotty79 wrote: post #128
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.

Yes, that was my first reading as well. I thought "((1D Conway's Life) glider) found" but it is "(1D (Conway's Life glider)) found".
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