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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

#211

Post by eru »

jacquesm wrote: post #161
eru wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your underlying system is linear and stable, you can pick any arbitrary precision you are interested in and compute all future behaviour to that precision on a digital computer. Btw, quantum mechanics is both linear and stable--and even deterministic. Admittedly it's a bit of a mystery how the observed chaotic nature of eg Newtonian billard balls emerges from quantum mechanics. 'Stable' in this case means that sma…

> If your underlying system is linear and stable Sure, but that 'If' isn't true for all but the simplest analog systems. Non-linearities are present in the most unexpected places and just about every system can be made to oscillate. That's the whole reason digital won out: not because we can't make analog computers but because it is impossible to make analog computers beyond a certain level of complexity if you want…

> Sure, but that 'If' isn't true for all but the simplest analog systems.

Quantum mechanics is linear and stable. Quantum mechanics is behind all systems (analog or otherwise), unless they become big enough that gravity becomes important.

> That's the whole reason digital won out: not because we can't make analog computers but because it is impossible to make analog computers beyond a certain level of complexity if you want deterministic behavior.

It's more to do with precision: analog computers have tolerances. It's easier and cheaper to get to high precision with digital computers. Digital computers are also much easier to make programmable. And in the case of analog vs digital electronic computers: digital uses less energy than analog.

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

#212

Post by taneq »

kitku wrote: post #189
taneq wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

You know what? I think I will.

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

#213

Post by gaigalas »

eru wrote: post #210
gaigalas wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thermod…

From the link you shared:

> the maximum amount of information that is required to perfectly describe a given physical system _down to the quantum level_

(emphasis added by me)

It looks like it makes predictions for the quantum layer and above.

--

Historically, we humans have a long proven track record of missing layers at the bottom that were unknown but now are known.

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

#214

Post by HackerThemAll »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #8

Hah, and a forum bug further down in the thread: > Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes.

phpBB which they use for forum is littered with bugs and security vulnerabilities. This one is clearly a race condition, not unheard of.

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

#215

Post by qnleigh »

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…

An interesting thing related to these questions in the context of physics: there was an interesting discussion on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago about why the universe should be quantum mechanical. One idea that was brought up is quite related to the open questions you name here.

Here's an excerpt from a comment of Daniel Harlow (a prof at MIT):

> In order for us to be having this discussion at all, the laws of physics need to have the ability to generate interesting complex structures in a reasonable amount of time starting from a simple initial state. Now I know that as a computer scientist you are trained to think that is a trivial problem because of Turing completeness, universality, blah blah blah, but really I don’t think it is so simple. Why should the laws of physics allow a Turing machine to be built? And even if a Turing machine is possible, why should one exist? I think the CS intuition that “most things are universal” comes with baked-in assumptions about the stability of matter and the existence of low-entropy objects, and I think it is not so easy to achieve these with arbitrary laws of physics.

Scott replies:

> Multiple people made the case to me that it’s far from obvious how well

(1) stable matter,

(2) complex chemistry,

(3) Lorentzian and other continuous symmetries,

(4) robustness against small perturbations,

(5) complex structures

being not just possible but likely from “generic” initial data,…can actually be achieved in simple Turing-universal classical cellular automaton models.

See comments 225 and 261

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6244

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

#216

Post by pontifier »

7373737373 wrote: post #209
pontifier wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Since it's not provable with pi, then we'd have to do a more circuitous proof of every finite pattern occurring. Inspired by Champernowne's constant, I propose a Pontifier Pattern that is simple, inefficient, but provably contains every finite pattern.

Starting at the origin, mark off rows of squares. the Nth row would contain NxN^2 squares of size n x n. Each square would be filled in left to right reading order with successive binary numbers with the most significant digit at the top left.

Somewhere in that pattern is the physics simulation of you reading this comment :)

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

#217

Post by vrighter »

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.

This is specifically a task that LLMs would be utterly useless at. Because they can't execute loops.

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

#218

Post by vrighter »

IAmBroom wrote: post #86
nilslindemann wrote: post #67

I would like to see a video.

Since the video screen would be larger than 1 Bpxl wide, I would accept a FHD scaled-out video.

Sure! Here you go. Open paint. Set the canvas to FHD resolution. Draw a one pixel thick, gray (#777777) line from one side to the other. You now have a perfect render, with antialiasing.

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

#219

Post by idiotsecant »

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.

I wonder, what would that be, that thing that is more meaningful?

I would make the case that, zoomed out far enough, nothing at all is meaningful, so you might as well make beautiful things, and this is a delightfully beautiful thing.

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

#220

Post by 7373737373 »

pontifier wrote: post #216
7373737373 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

Since it's not provable with pi, then we'd have to do a more circuitous proof of every finite pattern occurring. Inspired by Champernowne's constant, I propose a Pontifier Pattern that is simple, inefficient, but provably contains every finite pattern. Starting at the origin, mark off rows of squares. the Nth row would contain NxN^2 squares of size n x n. Each square would be filled in left to right reading order wit…

minor correction: 2^(NxN) squares per row, right?
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