Neat, reminds me of the 22 alpha amino acids that comprise our RNA/DNA.
Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#72Interestingly enough, the concept of placing gliders at a distance away seems to touch on the relativity of space and time. Here, with space, we are also encoding the time at which a certain pattern (a glider) appears where it's needed. In a rigid system like the GoL, we can't trade space with time easily, since everything happens at a constant speed, but it makes one wonder...
Far from being relativistic, it is a miniature simulated universe with a rigid flat geometry and a universal clock. it is interesting precisely because it is very simple and yet permits remarkably complex events.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#73How do I dive into this world? Any resources for a complete noob?
Not necessarily in this order:
* Download Golly https://golly.sourceforge.net/ and play around drawing random patterns. Have a look at the example patterns.
* Have a look around on the LifeWiki https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page. Click anything that looks interesting.
* Read the free online book https://conwaylife.com/book/
* Make an account on the forums https://conwaylife.com/forums/, or just lurk and see what people are talking about.
* Hang out on the Discord https://discord.gg/uA6uaGv3
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Not just any such pattern, though -- a still life also means that it doesn't change when you evolve it according to Life rules.)
Also we can only do the strict still lives (i.e. those which are connected https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Still_life#Strict_still_lifes ). We can't necessarily put down a 10-cell still life and an 11-cell still life near to each other.
Heh, not necessarily, that's true, in the sense that all the possible arrangements haven't been tested and shown to be constructible.
On the other hand, pseudo-still-life and quasi-still-life arrangements are much easier to construct on average than strict still lifes with the same number of cells.
I think the consensus is that someone could figure out how to construct any given stable 21-bit configuration. The non-strict cases are just a bit too numerous and not interesting enough, so nobody has gone through and formally checked them off the list.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are "garden of eden" patterns which can only exist as an initial configuration: there is no pattern which evolves into a garden of eden, hence there can be no constructor capable of building them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom... If we limit ourselves to glider interactions, the article links to the following patterns which cannot be constructed (including garden of eden patterns):…
I wonder if you could bypass this with a level of indirection. If the GoL wizards can construct an expanding and initially configurable 'GoL in GoL' grid [1], they could configure the 'garden of eden' as the initial configuration for their 'GoL in GoL' simulation. It's not the same thing, of course, but it would allow you to run Garden of Eden patterns still starting with just your initial 15 gliders. To construct a…
Sure, we can build them with "meta cells"; but that's just emulation (the same way a SNES emulator doesn't make my laptop a SNES).
We already have GoL turing machines (with "tape factories" that travel faster than the read/write head); we could likewise use those to emulate GoL with arbitrary input, just by setting up an appropriate "tape". The result is far less pretty though ;)
I touched on this in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33799084
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#76Hi there, I'm the author (of the blog post, not of the achievement itself)! So glad this is spreading. Feel free to ask here or on the post for more clarification if stuff is too unclear
Almost everything was unclear to me, but then I'm not familiar with the Game of Life lingo. Perhaps it would make sense to write a version that the educated public can understand, even without any Life background?
Funny. I first saw life over 40 years ago. I saw some crazy objects creates in my college days. I've seen occasional articles about breakthroughs over the years. Understanding gliders and spaceships has been my foundation to grok everything since. Being able to think in the abstract was a key to understanding this article for me, but without a few concrete foundational concepts... I stopped a few times reading it to laugh at how absurdly abstract and full of jargon it is. Completely meaningless techno-babble to the uninitiated. How much of my own specialization sounds so opaque to outsiders? Maybe all of it ;-)
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of advanced GoL is intuition and genius you were born with and how much is math/logic anyone can learn with enough time?
Definitely worth trying to learn! As with most topics, it starts out seeming hard to grasp, and then you start naming things and recognizing them. What looks like jargon to an outsider is just a compressed way of communicating. The people in the community are smart and tend to compress their ideas really far which makes the jargon even more extreme. Advanced gol is just getting past that first hurdle of understanding…
To be fair, that's the definition of jargon. Using domain specific language is something that's universal - it's a compression technique you see any domain where there's a need to communicate dense information. Abstraction affords precision, not ambiguity.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. I was thinking about spaceships and other oscillating movers.
It's not impossible that we could come up with a way of crashing less than 15 moving objects together to get an alternate RCT pattern. Gliders are generally considered to be the "lowest common denominator", though, so adding complexity by allowing more types of spaceships isn't usually seen as an improvement. ... It also becomes possible to cheat: I suspect we could put together something like an "RCT8" if we allowed…
To be honest, GoL isn’t quite as interesting as continuous-valued CAs — the latter break into quantum field territory.
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#79This is an incredible achievement. The most impressive piece of GoL engineering I've ever seen!
Clearly, number of gliders is no longer a good measure of complexity of constructions. Perhaps one should fix a straightforward way to encode a set of gliders by position (e.g. using [1]) and orientation and take the minimum number of bits of such a description.
Just one question:
> 1274729 – build a DBCA and pass control to it
> 192584 – build a new constructor that reads stored data instead of live data
> The final 200093 bits get stored in the Binary Storage and Retrieval device, these same 200093 bits are counted below:
How come this adds up to 1667406, which is 1615 more than the claimed total of 1665791 bits?
Re: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
#80Do we have any idea / intuition about what proportion of patterns are build-able? If not on an infinite grid, then some subset (i.e. 100% of 1x1 patterns are build-able, 80% of 3x3 patterns, 60% of 5x5 patterns, etc.)
This is a really good and not at all easy to answer question. The most I can say is that folks earlier this year used some SAT solver equivalent to find notable patterns that cannot be constructed - including a still life and an oscillator https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unsynthesizable_oscillator_1 . This doesn't have much bearing on the probability of constructability for an arbitrary large pattern.
Yeah, I was wondering, with todays computing power, if it were possible to run outrageously large random Life universes and use some sort of software to look for "interesting patterns" (whatever that means).
Or are these "discoveries" being done by hand?