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Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

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21–30 of 53 posts

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#21
post #2

The most expensive implementation of Conway's Game of Life ever - over $2,000 per step! (Probably the slowest too!)

Then try to calculate the energy / processing power spent per step.

The electricity isn't just paying for the one transaction it's paying to secure all historical transactions and all current balances.

When counting how expensive a visa transaction is, you don't also consider the price of all the bank vaults in the world and the staff protecting those vaults, because protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new transactions.

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then try to calculate the energy / processing power spent per step.

Assuming some market efficiency, those fees should be fairly similar to the cost to process that transaction into a block, so, 2,000 usd

This assumes that there's no inflation I believe. But on Ethereum there is inflation.

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#23
post #4

I absolutely love this. One of the more poetic reasons why I like Ethereum VM is because it seems likely to keep running for a very, very long time. I would take a Long Bet that it will still exist 100 years in the future. With that in mind, this might end up being the longest "continuously running" (both words with some heavy qualifiers) Conway's Game of Life implementation.

Ethereum doesn't have a mechanism to run an operation periodically. If you want this game to step forward you need to make a new transaction and pay new fees.

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#26

Please, stop it. Some things just shouldn't be.

It's deployed in a test network. The carbon footprint of this little experiment is negligible:

"This application would be able to run 'forever' - so long as there was some funds in an Ethereum account that could be used to run each 'step'.

However, the cost of Ethereum (and therefore 'gas') used to run smart contracts is so high that it would cost (in March 2021) over $80 just to register the smart contract, and to run a single 'step' of the game would cost over $2,000! No doubt that the code could be made more efficient and consume less resources, but hey that's just too much work for a concept app, so I have simply registered the contract on the Kovan test network instead, and use some 'fake' Ethereum to run the system. The app is the same, but it just points to the 'Kovan' test network instead of the Ethereum mainnet."

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#29

Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever. Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go! Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript https://docs.near.org/

NEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably the slowest too!)" :D NEAR is perfect to run a high performance simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/ where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the meanwhile

Re: Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

#30

If I could buy an NFT of the source code of this, would I have reached peak blockchain meta?

Only if you used chainlink to mint a new NFT per step. Then staked the NFTs on a different chain using a trust less bridge.

Quiet, they'll hear you.
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