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Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

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Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#61

Post by jacquesm »

e12e wrote: post #53
pervycreeper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

Not sure I can agree -- just as with all TLDs, it serves as a namespace. My.website isn't the same as My.webapp, which is different from My.webshop. I'm not sure any of these really are worse than My.com? In the end, it's just an alias for a numeric identifier.

Yes, they're much worse. TLDs are namespaces, not protocols or application level guides. Imagine: john@something.mywebsite ftp://something.mywebsite and so on. It makes no sense to indicate the desired protocol in the domain name. I know that for many people the 'web' and the 'net' are now synonymous but that's calcification and in the future that may simply not be true. I sincerely hope that the web is not the final word on connectivity.

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#62

Post by erikb »

I coded nearly the same game as a Java desktop application in 2009. Can't find the binary anymore though. It's lots of fun if you can tune some parameters, like make one species more fertile (reproduces every time, while others reproduce only 50% of the time into empty space, etc), more aggressive (can consume when surrounds an enemy from only two sides), or more strategic (tries to make sure not to get its fighting line broken up by a lucky enemy).

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#63

Post by PavlovsCat »

infinity0 wrote: post #39
sargun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the RNG is a deterministic random number generator, then that should make the entire game deterministic? Given independent runs, the decisions that each cell takes should occur in order, and therefore achieve the same result.

You don't know what the starting internal state of the RNG is, so no you can't predict it. The starting internal state being secret is what gives PRGs their security.

> You don't know what the starting internal state of the RNG is

Unless you give it a seed manually, of course. Say, 42?

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#64

Post by javra »

lettergram wrote: post #33

If you put a 4 x 8 purple block in the center of each color, the outcome will always be purple taking over the entire map. It seems like a fairly complex, and similar tactics in Go can achieve victory (victory being purple overtaking the map).

That could be true, I won everytime I played the purple stones in Go.

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#65

Post by logicallee »

pervycreeper wrote: post #42
tomrod wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so?

If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

You can't very well call it redundant when it's not possible to leave it off. There's no reason for a tld today. Every keyword should be a TLD, no reason you shouldn't go to http://microsoft

But given that that's not possible, http://microsoft.website would be better than http://microsoft.com except on historical grounds.

Do you know what "com" stands for? Commercial? Would you believe me if I made a convincing argument that it stands for something else - probably.

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#66

Post by e12e »

jacquesm wrote: post #61
e12e wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I can agree -- just as with all TLDs, it serves as a namespace. My.website isn't the same as My.webapp, which is different from My.webshop. I'm not sure any of these really are worse than My.com? In the end, it's just an alias for a numeric identifier.

Yes, they're much worse. TLDs are namespaces, not protocols or application level guides. Imagine: john@something.mywebsite ftp://something.mywebsite and so on. It makes no sense to indicate the desired protocol in the domain name. I know that for many people the 'web' and the 'net' are now synonymous but that's calcification and in the future that may simply not be true. I sincerely hope that the web is not the final…

I'd say if you want to email John that runs the "something" website, john@something.website is a perfectly fine email address... (as is ftp://something.website if you want to access the the something website via ftp....).

If something.website is actually not a website, then things are different. But we live with something.net not being an ISP, and something.com not actually being a commercial entity -- so I can't accept that the new TLDs are that much worse than the old ones? Not to mention the geographical based TLDs... is really "codewith.us" defined by being based in the USA?

Naming things are famously hard, and you can only have one TLD for a single "thing" (Not counting things like att.com for the commercial entity, and att.net for the ISP etc) -- if what you do is run a website (eg: medium, blogger, mypetproject.website) -- I don't see .website as being a particularly bad TLD.

All that said, I do agree with your last two paragraphs.

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#67

Post by hetid »

fishtastic wrote: post #18

This game is quite different from Conway's Game of Life because it's not deterministic. During a turn, cells will rely on Math.random to find whether to move or divide; the direction that the cell move into is also randomized.

To illustrate this, I made an extremely simple demo that's roughly the same in execution: http://jsfiddle.net/mkq1bvp7/5/

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#68

Post by kolev »

Argorak wrote: post #59
e12e wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"www" is generally taken to mean (world-wide-)web server (as opposed to ftp, gopher, telnet, smtp, imap or just "mail" server). So you could say needing both "http(s)://" and "www" is redundant. Similarly, http://ftp.company.com is a bit of a misnomer -- if it was an ftp server, you'd have to use "ftp://" -- but of course a single host might run several different daemons, or a daemon might speak several different pro…

http://ftp.company.com makes perfect sense. It is the http listing of the files stored on the server, linking to the actual files served using FTP. FTP isn't made for dynamic content and the file list is just that. The main role of the domain is FTP serving, though.

Good example!

Re: Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence

#69

Post by pervycreeper »

logicallee wrote: post #65
pervycreeper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

You can't very well call it redundant when it's not possible to leave it off. There's no reason for a tld today. Every keyword should be a TLD, no reason you shouldn't go to http://microsoft But given that that's not possible, http://microsoft.website would be better than http://microsoft.com except on historical grounds. Do you know what "com" stands for? Commercial? Would you believe me if I made a convincing argum…

I see your point (imagine an alternate future where websites are uncommon, for instance), but I would expect that a very large number of URLs will persist and remain live for quite some time into the future. So that TLD must be viewed in a context where other TLDs

As it stands, TLDs are not used for their intended respective purposes in practice (.com for commercial, country codes, etc), so expecting this situation to suddenly change is unrealistic. I would expect, in fact, that the most successful uses of .website will be by smartasses for IRC, email, etc.

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