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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

#91

Post by ethmarks »

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.

And if each cell was a cubic micrometer (which is a side length 200-300 times smaller than a pixel on a typical screen and 50-100 times thinner than a human hair), it'd still stretch 3.7 kilometers, which is about the length of a commercial airport runway.

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

#92

Post by smallerize »

pohl wrote: post #68
smallerize wrote: post #57

Earlier 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

Right, but that's not what adzm was asking about.

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

#93

Post by layer8 »

tantalor wrote: post #84
layer8 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, “orthogonal” here just means “not diagonal”. Since GoL configurations don’t have a distinguished orientation (you can rotate and/or mirror them however you like), it wouldn’t make sense to specify up/down/left/right, at least not without first fixing an (arbitrary) orientation.

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

#94

Post by jacquesm »

chuckadams wrote: post #88
DesiLurker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question really ultimately resolves to whether the universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with god, because I would see that as proof of all of this being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being makes me hope that it is analog.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #94
chuckadams wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question really ultimately resolves to whether the universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with god, because I would see that as proof of all of this being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being makes me hope that it is analog.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by azeirah »

chuckadams wrote: post #88
DesiLurker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch.

It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points:

- "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to complexity when iterated upon - The invention of field of computation is as big and important of an invention as the field of mathematics

The last one is less explicit, but it's what I took away from it. Computation is of course part of mathematics, but it is a kind of "live" mathematics. Executable mathematics.

Super cool book and absolutely worth reading if you're into this kind of thing.

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

#99

Post by londons_explore »

btilly wrote: post #62
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.

Turing completeness relies on infinite state.

With finite state, one could theoretically brute force search every possible 1D sequence to find a glider shorter than the one discovered here.

Obviously that's impractical, but turns the whole thing into a search problem - find the best/a good solution in a huge search space.

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

#100

Post by OscarCunningham »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #71

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?

Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever search algorithms. There's also the approach of running trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for interesting patterns. These small patterns are then pieced together to build the larger structures.
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