Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#61

Post by Suppafly » Wed, Mar 19, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

nxobject wrote: post #38

moregrist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_. I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata. They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and…

Not to weigh against Wolfram one last time, but he's (finally?) renamed Mathematica just "Wolfram". Why he would toss out years of brand-related goodwill is beyond me.

>Why he would toss out years of brand-related goodwill is beyond me.

I suspect that Wolfram is the bigger name ever since Wolfram Alpha has been a thing. I'm sure way more people interact with that than Mathematica. Besides, as far as I can tell, it's still named and marketed as Wolfram Mathematica, not really sure where you got the idea it was renamed.

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#62

Post by hollerith » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

FilosofumRex wrote: post #56

hollerith wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is different: I think Wolfram is plenty hard-working, but his internal mental life is so full of fantasies of unlimited success and fame that he cannot manage an impartial-enough evaluation of his own work output.

"your impression", is true only in the Ruliad. Ask people who knew him back in the 80's... he never worked on anything on his own that has amounted to anything. He is a real life crank, crackpot and all around charlatan. Mathematica is the product of 30 years of work on Macsyma and Maple systems at MIT and elsewhere, which he cracked its codebase, usurped and sold to an unsuspecting academic community back when only…

So, ah, my "full of fantasies of unlimited success and fame" was not derogatory enough for your tastes, then?

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#63

Post by TheMode » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 5:23 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #52

tromp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example would be a CA that takes an exponential number of steps to emulate n steps of a Turing machine. That allows you to predict exponentially far into the future by running the TM machine instead.

This insight is why I stopped trying to use CA as my underlying computational substrate in genetic programming experiments. It is much, much cheaper to run something like brainfuck programs than it is to simulate CA on a practical computer. A switch statement over 8 instructions contained in a contiguous byte array will essentially teleport its way through your CPU's architecture.

I feel like CA (single, or multi-state) would work quite well on dedicated hardware, how big could the grid even be? I may be missing the obvious, but it does seem easier to scale compared to cores and manual dispatch.

But otherwise yeah, not the most efficient on current CPUs.

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#64

Post by the__alchemist » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

This article is fascinating! Some of the concepts in it, like _computational irreducibility_ seem to be core concepts that live in a domain so low I'm not sure where to define its bounds. At the same fuzzy level of "evolution".

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#65

Post by Isamu » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

Even if you are a hater, this is a very interesting and information-rich overview. Wolfram is relentlessly litigating his place in history and this piece is no exception but I enjoyed the almost manic amount of detail. Long read indeed.

Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life

#66

Post by bob1029 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

TheMode wrote: post #63

bob1029 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This insight is why I stopped trying to use CA as my underlying computational substrate in genetic programming experiments. It is much, much cheaper to run something like brainfuck programs than it is to simulate CA on a practical computer. A switch statement over 8 instructions contained in a contiguous byte array will essentially teleport its way through your CPU's architecture.

I feel like CA (single, or multi-state) would work quite well on dedicated hardware, how big could the grid even be? I may be missing the obvious, but it does seem easier to scale compared to cores and manual dispatch. But otherwise yeah, not the most efficient on current CPUs.

To be fair, a one-dimensional CA is effectively a sort of UTM with a weird program counter and instruction set. I think the more useful CAs will tend to be of the higher dimensional variety (beyond 2D/3D). Simulating a CA in hyperspace seems problematic even if you are intending to purpose build the hardware.