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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

#81

Me: 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.

if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet but very interesting.

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

#82

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.

well...

1) GoL is turing complete

2) there are algorithms that calculate digits of Pi or e.

so... yes?

but if I just took any old Pi-digits algorithm and encoded it on GoL, its appearance would not be meaningful or "elegant" to our senses. You're probably asking "what does the shortest/most elegant program to calculate Pi in GoL look like, and does it maybe have some unexpected relation to other mathematical terms like, I dunno, Euler's identity or... Mandelbrot set?" And then you would probably need to answer the question "Well, how would you like the digits encoded and represented?".

All of a sudden your question becomes a bit ambiguous. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

I mean.... I think I feel what you're asking, like... is there some primal version of Pi that can be encoded in GoL initial condition with as few bits as possible but I'm afraid that the answer is something like "well, that depends on what you mean by [...]"

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

#83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

But he did call Mae West "my little chickadee", right?

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

#84
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Thanks!

I was a bit confused by that wiki page because it says "Direction Orthogonal" but like you said that can't be.

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

#85
post #55

Anyone have a recording of what this thing looks like? I'm very curious to see it and didn't see any obvious links in the thread.

My understanding is that, it is so large and takes so long to run, there is really no way to visualize it

There is of course a way to visualize it, but it would be more boring than a Tommy Wiseau film... with a less reasonable plot.

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

#87
post #18

Reading 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.

More or less like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJk4y9NGvE

It’s technobabble https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet but very interesting.

Wolfram is kind of obsessed with cellular automata, even went and wrote a whole book about them titled "A New Kind of Science". The reception to it was a bit mixed. CA are Turing-complete, so yeah, you can compute anything with them, I'm just not sure that in itself leads to any greater Revealed Truths. Does make for some fun visualizations though.

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

#89
post #3

Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.

The best way to run it is in the software Golly. It has the HashLife algorithm needed to make it run fast enough to see it finish.
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