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A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

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Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#41

Post by m12k »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #39

Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata? I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on "bit processors" if it ran on special purpose hardware? So instead of 64-bit processors we might have "64-cell processors" ?

Do modern graphics cards have optimizations for applying a kernel to a texture? If so, that should work well with cellular automata too

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#42

Post by smoldesu »

idiotsecant wrote: post #35
jodrellblank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that Conway didn't like much, saying (roughly) that it had all been explored and proved and other work of his was more interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA in this Numberphile interview with him.

This reminds me a lot of the aging rockstar who hates the billboard top 10 hit that he always gets asked to play.

If you're Thom Yorke, you use that hatred to drive you to build your magnum opus. Though admittedly, I don't know how one could iterate on Game of Life. It's simplicity is part of what makes it so great.

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#43

Post by jonsen »

pfarrell wrote: post #13
spicybright wrote: post #3

I still can't get over how much interest the game of life maintains since it's invention. It might just be my favorite "field" of CS at this point. It's such a satisfying intersection of maths, coding, "biology", and "biological engineering".

Totally. It's amazing how much complexity arises from something so simple. Just like in the game itself :). We lost someone special when we lost John Conway.

We've still got Stephen Wolfram.

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#44

Post by mirekrusin »

Aperocky wrote: post #23
spicybright wrote: post #3

I still can't get over how much interest the game of life maintains since it's invention. It might just be my favorite "field" of CS at this point. It's such a satisfying intersection of maths, coding, "biology", and "biological engineering".

I like to think of this as the power of simplicity. A transistor is a simple piece of electronic, when combined in billions, it supports the incredible information transformation we see today.

This is great thought. How many transistors make computer interesting has some parallels with how many neutrons create consciousness.

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#45

Post by a4isms »

idiotsecant wrote: post #35
jodrellblank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that Conway didn't like much, saying (roughly) that it had all been explored and proved and other work of his was more interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA in this Numberphile interview with him.

This reminds me a lot of the aging rockstar who hates the billboard top 10 hit that he always gets asked to play.

Yes, and both have my sympathy. Sometimes, a musician revisits their earlier work and finds new things to explore. Joni Mitchell and Ryuchi Sakamoto come to mind.

But other times, a musician feels that although their earlier work may be new and exciting to you, they are finding other things more engaging today and tire of answering questions about the old work with the same rote, trite answers. Over and over again.

For someone constantly seeking fresh ground to cover, this attitude is an asset.

p.s. In this discussion about comedy, Louis CK talks about a tip he got from George Carlin, namely to throw the old material out after a year and start over again, forcing yourself to find new things to say about the Universe.

In the same discussion, Jerry Seinfeld explains that some of his material is ten years old, and he is still finding ways to sharpen and refine it. There is clearly no one right way about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#47

Post by eesmith »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #39

Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata? I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on "bit processors" if it ran on special purpose hardware? So instead of 64-bit processors we might have "64-cell processors" ?

GoL implementations for big systems don't evaluate the cellular automata step-by-step. They implement HashLife - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife . The first example on that page shows position 6.3+ octillion for a Turing machine, computed in under 30 seconds.

If the special purpose hardware ran at 1 THz, it would take about 4 quadrillion seconds to get to the same point, which is a bit over 200 million years.

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#48

Post by AprilArcus »

davesque wrote: post #37

One interesting thing about this is that it serves as a kind of simplified demonstration of the kind of computation that must be occurring or could occur with actual cellular biology. DNA really seems somewhat like a tape in a Turing machine (although technically a read-only one). But the entire system does compute a result which is an organism.

You might be interested to learn that DNA is not actually read-only. Besides viruses like HIV and transposable elements which permanently splice themselves in to the host's DNA, antibodies gain specificity through irreversible self-editing of the lymphocyte's genome via a similar (and perhaps, evolutionarily related) mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#49

Post by davesque »

AprilArcus wrote: post #48
davesque wrote: post #37

One interesting thing about this is that it serves as a kind of simplified demonstration of the kind of computation that must be occurring or could occur with actual cellular biology. DNA really seems somewhat like a tape in a Turing machine (although technically a read-only one). But the entire system does compute a result which is an organism.

You might be interested to learn that DNA is not actually read-only. Besides viruses like HIV and transposable elements which permanently splice themselves in to the host's DNA, antibodies gain specificity through irreversible self-editing of the lymphocyte's genome via a similar (and perhaps, evolutionarily related) mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

Fascinating. Thanks so much for this! Natural biology really is miraculous (to use a loaded term).

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#50

Post by davesque »

This makes me wonder. If cells were occasionally activated in random positions, what sorts of modifications to the architecture would be necessary to make the system robust and still able to carry out its computations with a reasonable probability of success? Would that even be possible? In other words, what kinds of modifications to this system would make it more like a natural biological system that has to cope with noise and interference from its environment?
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