Can someone who knows a bit more about this help me understand how structures like this are produced? Is there some kind of computer search, perhaps guided? Is this a clever combination of sub-structures, timing mechanisms, etc. that are then fit together like Legos?
1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
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Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because it's not "game of life jargon", it's "cellular automata" jargon. Which is a field of math and comes along with a bunch of math jargon from related fields.
I searched several of these terms and they are all specifically jargon of game of life enthusiasts, (i.e. search reaults are all on fansites related to game of life) not general cellular automata jargon.
I assume there's fanfic shipping of automata...
(If you don't recognize that use of "shipping", don't google it at work.)
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start... It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
> Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1, 2025. Almost 10 years of development.
Development, idle hacking when someone got bored at work; potato, potahto...
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start... It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
How many steps is the period? How far does it travel in that period? What direction does it go? Does it clean up after itself?
As the wiki page states, the period is 133076755768, and it moves by two cells in that time. Spaceships in GoL by definition don’t leave anything behind, they produce the exact same configuration, just shifted across the grid.
Given that it starts as a single line, it is symmetric in the axis implied by that line, and hence can’t possibly move diagonally or orthogonal to the line. Hence it moves in the direction of the line.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#75Two 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…
Your first question is discussed in the book The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (1984).
One of the chapters asks "what is life?". It considers (and rejects) various options, and finally settles upon a definition based on Von Neumann-style self-replicating machines using blueprints and universal constructors, and explains why this is the most (only?) meaningful definition of life.
Later, it talks about how one would go about creating such a machine in Conway's Game of Life. When the book was written in 1984, no one had actually created one (they need to be very large, and computers weren't really powerful enough then). But in 2010 Andrew J. Wade created Gemini, the first successful self-replicating machine in GoL, which I believe meets the criteria - and hence is "alive" according to that definition (but only in the sense that, say, a simple bacteria is alive). And I think it works somewhat like how it was sketched out in the book.
Another chapter estimated how big (and how densely populated) a randomly-initialized hypothetical GoL universe would need to be in order for "life" (as defined earlier) to appear by chance. I don't recall the details - but the answer was mind-boggling big, and also very sparsely populated.
All that only gives you life though, not intelligence. But life (by this definition) has the potential to evolve through a process of natural selection to achieve higher levels of complexity and eventually intelligence, at least in theory.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#76Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to experience what it’s like for my spouse to listen to my work conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.
One exception: You are actually enthused about the topic you don't understand.
Your SO is likely only enthused to the degree that it affects your mood. "So this RISC architecture isn't compliant with ADA-1056 after all? And you were right all along? Wow, that's great, honey!"
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#77Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.
My understanding (which could be wildly wrong, I only skimmed the thread) is that it's running in a standard 2-dimensional Game of Life grid, it just happens to start out as a 1x3.7B cell line.
Pretty sure the GOL grid has more than one of those lines...
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#78Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don’t quite understand what exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more… The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary…
Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive amounts of time and brain power to this.
I think it appeals to the same itch that languages like Brainfuck scratch.
There's something exceedingly interesting about how you can model complexity with something extremely simple. Brainfuck is fun because it forces you to think extremely low level, because ultimately it is basically just a raw implementation of a Turing machine. I wouldn't want to write a big program in it, but it is fun to think about how you might express a complicated algorithm with it.
Similarly with CGOL, it is really interesting to see how far you can stretch really simple rules into something really complex.
I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The GP understood that.
Re: 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#80So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line? That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here. Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!
See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start... It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
I'm barely able to follow, but this part was fun:
> The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.