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

conwaylife.com

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

#181
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Pasting AI garbage you don't understand is worse than useless.

If it's garbage, it's reposting garbage. A huge percentage of posts are garbage anyway, whether because they are mere opinions, or because they are overconfident guesses from Internet Experts(TM).

If it's not garbage, it shines a light into the workings without each of us having to understand what's going on.

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

#182

makes me wonder if its possible to get natural numbers like pi/e using a geometric structure in GoL. it would be interesting to derive them from an emerging order based on fixed set of automata rules. If possible it might lead credence to simulated universe hypothesis.

well... 1) GoL is turing complete 2) there are algorithms that calculate digits of Pi or e. so... yes? but if I just took any old Pi-digits algorithm and encoded it on GoL, its appearance would not be meaningful or "elegant" to our senses. You're probably asking "what does the shortest/most elegant program to calculate Pi in GoL look like, and does it maybe have some unexpected relation to other mathematical terms li…

Adam P. Goucher's pi-calculator pattern is quite elegant, I'd say. It prints the decimal digits in-universe, with Conway's Life blocks for pixels.

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Pi_calculator

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

#183

How in the world do people even discover these things? Certainly not by clicking cells to set up an initial population then hit "Go". Brute force approach works I suppose.

It is constructed by using modules with known behaviour. And some brute force.

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

#184
post #78

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…

In the music world there are people who will build whole symphonies out of one sample, one filter, and one delay patch.

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

#185
Tangential, but to people who find this topic interesting I highly recommend the book What is Intelligence [0] by Blaise Agüera y Arcas that views life through the lens of mutating self replicating Turing machines.

In the book he also talks about GoF, but one of the fascinating experiments he did is that a "computronium" of initially random Brainfuck programs (that obviously don't do anything interesting in the beginning) that mutate (by flipping random bits) and merge (by taking two random programs and sticking them together) eventually, after a sudden phase transition, start to self replicate by producing gradually better copies of themselves!

He also argues that symbiogenesis (merging replicators into a whole that does more than its parts) is the main driving force of evolution instead of just random mutations, because the random Brainfuck computronium eventually produces replicators even without the random bit flips.

[0] https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org

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

#186

> 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 enjoy the [GoL -> our “reality” -> outside-the-simulation] comparison. It really drives home how unlikely we would be to understand the outside-the-simulation world.

Of course, there are other variants (see qntm's https://qntm.org/responsibility) where the simulation _is_ a simulation of the world outside. And we have GoL in GoL :-)

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's awesome that they can do this amazing fun esoteric stuff, but at the same time a small part of me thinks maybe they need to be doing something more meaningful in the real world.

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

#188
Pretty please with a cherry on top use standard SI multipliers for numbers like this. I can't be sure without reading the article whether you mean 3.7G cells or 3.7T cells. Billion is ambiguous having different meanings to different people and should not be used as a word any longer.

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

#189
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's awesome that they can do this amazing fun esoteric stuff, but at the same time a small part of me thinks maybe they need to be doing something more meaningful in the real world.

This small part is what makes broken people. Whoever reads this, go have fun! :)

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

#190
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?&…

OK, I didn't know if it was a "true" replicator (what even does "true" mean) so I excluded it. And, running a true replicator from other rule in 0E0P takes millenia, so that leaves DOGun SaGaQR (specifically the QR configuration). Sorry.
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