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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

#61

Post by btilly »

munchler wrote: post #33
bezko wrote: post #16

“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like it's 1972 again.

Off-topic, but like a lot of quotes attributed to Twain, there’s no evidence he said that. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

As Mark Twain also said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on."

Of course he didn't say that one either: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

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

#62

Post by btilly »

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.

You can change "might not" to "have not".

The Game of Life is Turing complete. And therefore a complete analysis of how to write programs in it would imply a solution to the Halting problem. Which is impossible.

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

#64

Post by zkmon »

In 1995, I received an email from someone named Conway asking me for more details about some silly thing I wrote in sci.math usenet group. Later I came to know more abut him as John Conway. Sadly I lost access to those emails.

Now, I'm unaware of this strange GoL world with amazing work people are doing. Sometimes I wonder which frontiers of progress, should we as human race be utilizing this amazing creative potential of the current generations.

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

#65

Post by DesiLurker »

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.

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

#66

Post by Someone »

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 Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs.

I think people will disagree about whether “Turing-complete” is powerful enough for supporting intelligence but let’s assume it does.

> So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?

Even if it doesn’t, it might take only one intelligent life form for the space to (eventually) get filled with it (the game of life doesn’t heave energy constraints that make it hard to travel over long distances, so I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t. On the other hand, maybe my assumption that all intelligent life would want to expand is wrong), and in an infinite plane, it’s likely (¿certain?) one will exist.

On the other hand it’s likely more than one exists, and they might be able to exterminate each other.

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

#68

Post by pohl »

smallerize wrote: post #57
pohl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it would not be possible?

To make a new cell "live" it must be neighbored by three live cells. And in 2d, a cell only has two neighbors.

I see what you're saying, but I think it's a misunderstanding. 1D here only means that there's some state where the active cells are confined to one row — but one row within the ordinary 2D GoL plane. I'm sure the next iteration leaps off the line immediately. Search for "Blinker" here to imagine how it could start spreading off the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

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

#69

Post by nomel »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #29
sebzim4500 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the first step it isn't 1D any more, so I don't think that visualization is possible

It's possible. It'd just be a 3D visualization and more importantly, stupendously huge. If each cell was a cubic millimeter, the shape would be 3700km wide, and stretch 1/3rd of the way to the moon.

I'm having trouble finding a common image file format that has > 32bit resolution fields, fit it in.
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