Wow. I'm pretty sure I fully understand every concept involved, but I doubt I could put it all together.
Oddly beautiful seeing it run too. And the gliders flowing around put me in mind a bit of the ants that run Pratchett's Hex.
Building a computer in Conway's game of life
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#62This reminds me of 'Permutation City', one of my favourite sci-fi novels. Cellular automata play a pivotal role in this book, which, despite some small misgivings, has largely aged rather well.
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be difficult. In particular, unlike in our world, it's very difficult to create anything like a stable membrane or barrier in the game of life. And patterns are extremely susceptible to falling apart if perturbed. So you would generally expect a game-of-life-based entity touching anything to die as a result.
Since the game of life is Turing complete, it can simulate any computer. If a computer can eventually simulate the world (including humans), so can the game of life. This doesn't mean the patterns would visually look like cells and membranes though...
It's hard to imagine an emulated version of a human having a consciousness, however. What is it that separates transistors firing randomy from a CPU executing specific consciousness-generating instructions? I find these things thought-provoking.
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#64Wow. I'm pretty sure I fully understand every concept involved, but I doubt I could put it all together. Oddly beautiful seeing it run too. And the gliders flowing around put me in mind a bit of the ants that run Pratchett's Hex.
Just like building a real computer, you don't have to hold all of the concepts in your mind at once, just start with basic building blocks and work your way up the ladder of abstraction to parentheses or space invaders or whatever floats your boat. :)
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#65Cool and all that, but isn't this... practically and intellectually useless? Surely, you can build a computer using pebbles on the sea shore by aligning them in the specific order. How is that surprising?
An obvious example would be intellectual cross-pollination. This project is likely to get a lot of exposure in the Game of Life community as well as the Computer Science community, increasing the chances that members of either community feel compelled to cross over and contribute in an area that may have previously seemed uninteresting/unpromising/unknown.
While that's true for posts like this in general, in this specific case those communities are the same. Conway's Game of Life is a computer science curio.
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be difficult. In particular, unlike in our world, it's very difficult to create anything like a stable membrane or barrier in the game of life. And patterns are extremely susceptible to falling apart if perturbed. So you would generally expect a game-of-life-based entity touching anything to die as a result.
Since the game of life is Turing complete, it can simulate any computer. If a computer can eventually simulate the world (including humans), so can the game of life. This doesn't mean the patterns would visually look like cells and membranes though...
Turing machines in the game of life have the same problem of being unprotected and extremely sensitive to perturbations. It drastically lowers the chance of generating a working one (even when running for extremely long times on extremely large boards). Contrast with our world, where it seems like just starting with a whole lot of randomly distributed hydrogen could be enough.
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#67Wow. I'm pretty sure I fully understand every concept involved, but I doubt I could put it all together. Oddly beautiful seeing it run too. And the gliders flowing around put me in mind a bit of the ants that run Pratchett's Hex.
Just like building a real computer, you don't have to hold all of the concepts in your mind at once, just start with basic building blocks and work your way up the ladder of abstraction to parentheses or space invaders or whatever floats your boat. :)
That can fall down a little when it comes to debugging. You end up having to break everything back down to component parts more than if you could keep larger parts in your head at once.
I probably could do it, understanding all the parts implies that. Eventually. Just not in a reasonable amount of time, and perhaps not as neatly.
Re: Building a computer in Conway's game of life
#68But can it run Doom?
I suppose any Turing complete language could. You could run DOOM in PowerPoint if you were masochistic enough.
There’s a Doom clone for excel: