Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then, importantly, it collapses itself back down to a 1-dimensional copy of its starting representation, but translated.
Can it leave other bits behind after it moves?
No, if it does it's called a puffer.
1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
191–200 of 223 posts
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Smoke refers to fairly long lived debris that eventually dies out, the term for one that leaves permanent debris is a puffer.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#193Earlier 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…
In the music world there are people who will build whole symphonies out of one sample, one filter, and one delay patch.
"So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters" - Tobias Wolff, Old School
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#1941D? One dimensional? So it‘s just an unfathomably long line? In which direction does it glide?
Life is isotropic, so it remains symmetric vertically. It travels horizontally but I don't know which direction because it's so unfathomably large you would need a supercomputer to run at least a cycle of it.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#195How on earth did they find this? It's akin to creating a genome out of thin air and expecting a living creature to pop out at the other end.
It's engineered, not natural/random.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
SKI can, of course, be de-optimised a bit further by replacing I with SKK. You are right though that it is relatively simply to go from something that looks like a normal program languages to a pile of S and K combinators. Not the most efficient way to compute though!
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#197Earlier 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
Misue is still use, that's why the source adds the parenthetical to the mis in (mis)use. It's a novel field we can name things whatever we want.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#198Earlier 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
With the metatopic of this thread being obscure languages, I had some fun squeezing this into some list comprehensions (maybe someone's got an idea of how to keep track of the state within the list):
```
$ cat pi.py
state = [0, 0, 2*8, 2*12]; _ = [print(f'\rRun {state.__setitem__(0, state[0] + 1) or state[0]}/{state[3]} | Last \u03c0: {current_pi:.6f} | *Average \u03c0: {(state.__setitem__(1, state[1] + current_pi) or state[1]) / state[0]:.6f}*', end='', flush=True) for current_pi in [(4 * sum([1 for _ in range(state[2]) if __import__("random").random()*2 + __import__("random").random()*2 EOF
$ time python3 pi.py
Run 4096/4096 | Last π: 3.140625 | *Average π: 3.143051*
python3 pi.py 0.41s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 0.429 total
```
Play around with the `2*8` and `2*10` values in the state, they control the amount of rounds and the range in which the random values get generated respectively.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#199Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.
Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles: Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life Gliders: https://en.wikip…
I knew what a glider was,
what I am personally still wondering is,
what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?
I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,
so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?
Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?
Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?
I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start... It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
Only about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.
Also share about 60 percent with bananas.