1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by DesiLurker » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #147

DesiLurker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet but very interesting.

If you're interested in science fiction based on this concept, Greg Egan has a book called Permutation City which is pretty interesting.

I think I've read it or maybe a portion of it, was not very captivating. will try again.

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

#202

Post by DesiLurker » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

terlisimo wrote: post #82

DesiLurker wrote: post #65

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…

yes you are right the question was ambiguous. WHat I was really looking for is if there is a way to physically derive PI out of some basic cellular automata operations. that does not necessarily have to involve circles etc. much less so about representing digits of PI itself. just that an pattern that evolves into ever more accurate values of pi (or a quantity derived from pi). this definitly must not be encoded or somehow preprogrammed into the GoL's initial condition. In fact I dont even care if the evolution rules of standard GoL are followed. just that SOME set of rules automatically produce PI-derivative.

the reason it would be cool is because then we've taken a most fundamental geometric constant and derived it from purely graph update type of mechanics. if you could do that then likely you can do a whole set of other things like physical laws.

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

#203

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #18

Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to experience what it’s like for my spouse to listen to my work conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.

One of the nice things about having my spouse also working in a tech field is that we can bitch about our jobs to each other on a higher level :P

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

#204

Post by bibimsz » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #187

idiotsecant wrote: post #175

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.

the only thing that's meaningful is having fun, everything else is a waste of time

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

#205

Post by pontifier » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:16 PM UTC

zellyn wrote: post #186

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Always a fun read :) they turned it into a futurama episode

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

#206

Post by pontifier » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

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 thing that blows my mind is: say you start filling the plane with pi. Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence. That means that somewhere in the plane is a full physics simulation of YOU in the room you are in right now.

Does that you exist any less fully because its not currently in the memory of a computer being evaluated?

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

#207

Post by tombert » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:41 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #132

tombert wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

> I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to. Writing a naive CGOL is fun and quick. But writing a _fast_ one can get arbitrarily complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Yeah, a million years ago I did that one as a convolutions so I could run it on the GPU when I was learning OpenCL. That was my first exposure to “optimizing” CGOL.

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

#208

Post by fsflover » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:54 PM UTC

pontifier wrote: post #206

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 thing that blows my mind is: say you start filling the plane with pi. Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence. That means that somewhere in the plane is a full physics simulation of YOU in the room you are in right now. Does that you exist any less fully because its not currently in the memory of a computer being evaluated?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466

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

#209

Post by 7373737373 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

pontifier wrote: post #206

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 thing that blows my mind is: say you start filling the plane with pi. Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence. That means that somewhere in the plane is a full physics simulation of YOU in the room you are in right now. Does that you exist any less fully because its not currently in the memory of a computer being evaluated?

> Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence

This has not been proven yet: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/216348/575868

(or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_sequence)

Depending on the infinite grid filling scheme even these properties may not be sufficient to guarantee that every two dimensional pattern is initially generated because the grid is two-dimensional, but the number property is "one-dimensional". A spiral pattern for example may always make it line up in a way such that certain 2d patterns are never generated.

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

#210

Post by eru » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 1:02 AM UTC

gaigalas wrote: post #150

eru wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Or it could be an optimisation algorithm like evolution. Or even just lots and lots of variation and some process selecting which one we focus our attention one. Compare the anthropic principle.

For all we know, it could be distinct layers all the way down to infinity. Each time you peel one, something completely different comes up. Never truly knowable. The universe has thrown more than a few hints that our obsession with precision and certainty could be seen cosmically as "silly". In our current algorithmic-obsessed era, this is reminiscent of procedural generation (but down/up the scale of complexity, not…

> For all we know, it could be distinct layers all the way down to infinity. Each time you peel one, something completely different comes up. Never truly knowable. The universe has thrown more than a few hints that our obsession with precision and certainty could be seen cosmically as "silly".

That's a tempting thing to say, but quantum mechanics suggests that we don't have infinite layers at the bottom. Most thermodynamic arguments combined with quantum mechanics. See eg also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound about the amount of information that can even in theory be contained in a specific volume of space time.