11 ms·
Is this c/10 spaceship known?
- pervycreeper 11y agoThis writeup (found a few pages into the thread) explains things in a little bit more detail for a newcomer. https://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship-speed-in-conways-game-of-life/ https://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship-sp...
- jessriedel 11y agoThis is a great post.
- vehementi 11y agoThat is an awesome post and gives hints into the depth the community has gone into the conway game
- ticklemyelmo 11y agoHint: Click "Show in viewer" in the first message. Zoom out a bit. Press play.
- nkrisc 11y agoSkimming through the thread, I realized I had no idea of the type of community that exists surrounding Conway's game. I think it's awesome.
- cakeface 11y agoI know! There is probably some corollary to Rule 34 that states that for every obscure topic there is an internet forum of people dedicated to it.
- chc4 11y agoThere is, naturally, a relevant XKCD about this: https://xkcd.com/1095/ https://xkcd.com/1095/
- tod222 11y agoThe Life community goes back decades! Some members recently have put together a distributed soup search project to catalog objects that appear naturally. While the c/10 spaceship wasn't found in the search, a number of interesting things have been discovered. For more information about the catalog effort (named "catagolue" for Game of Life), the object database, and the distributed client, see http://catagolue.appspot.com/home http://catagolue.appspot.com/home
- heavenlyhash 11y agoThat's a beautifully concise numbering system for sharing being used there. Now if only we had descriptions of chemistry that were this terse. Imagine if this kind of problem solving, collaboration, simulation, and instant verification were the norm for synthetic chem. One of the comments -- "[Let's] use gencols to rub the ship against gliders and *WSSs to see whether there is a useful collision to maybe build a puffer" -- just blew me away. If this were chemistry, that commentator would have been suggesting automatic nanomachine factory discovery. (InChI appears to be close. But vast amounts of data are locked up in obtuse formats are either Assigned-Names-And-Numbers style formats which are useless to indexing and similarity searches, or formats that embed non-relative coordinates in 3d space, etc, in such a way that computing a deterministic ID for sharing is practically a nonstarter.)
- david-given 11y agoIt does help that Game of Life physics is somewhat simpler than Real Life physics. Of course, Real Life physics is a little less apt to collapse into a seething mass of undifferentiated matter of you poke it in the wrong place. This is the slowest spaceship known, right? (Which isn't a machine made out of other parts?)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago> It does help that Game of Life physics is somewhat simpler than Real Life physics. Are we sure of that yet? > Real Life physics is a little less apt to collapse into a seething mass of undifferentiated matter of you poke it in the wrong place. Are we sure of that yet?
- eru 11y agoWe are sure that Game of Life physics is simpler than Real Life _chemistry_. There, fixed that for you.
- Rhapso 11y agoIt also helps that we GoL comes with the capacity to instantiate the universe in any configuration we wish, rather than being forced to coerce it into that state from scratch.
- stephenitis 11y agoI'm confused about what I'm looking at... is this a pattern that emerges in conways game of life?
- stefs 11y agoit's a pattern that "moves forward", i.e. recreates itself at another position.
- Someone 11y agoAt speed c/10, "one tenth of a cell in each iteration", or, better said: after ten iterations, the pattern has moved one cell, but is otherwise unchanged. That's why it is called a glider; it glides through the grid (a puffer stays at its location and returns to its original snape after some time, but periodically sends out gliders) What's new here, apparently, is that this is the first glider discovered with that speed. It also is surprisingly small.
- mmanfrin 11y agoReally great explanation, thank you!
- baddox 11y agoIt is. Someone discovered that if you start with that initial pattern you get a "spaceship" that moves. I gather that it is an impressive find both because of how small it is (you'd expect someone or a computer to have already discovered it) and how slow it moves.
- Mauricio_ 11y agoamazing
- xamuel 11y agoVery nice! You might be interested in a simple proof I found of why c/2 and c/3 are speed limits for orthogonal and diagonal spaceships respectively. Definition: In a gameplay of life, an "infinite lifeline" is a sequence of pairs (c_i,n_i) such that each c_i is alive in generation n_i and either c_(i+1)=c_i or c_(i+1) is adjacent to c_i. Lemma ("Two Forbidden Directions"): Let x,y be any two 'forbidden' directions from among N,S,E,W,NE,NW,SE,SW. In any gameplay of life that starts finite and doesn't die out, there is an infinite lifeline that never goes in either direction x or y. The lemma's proof uses biology. Say that (c,n) is a "father" of (c',n+1) if c' is the cell adjacent to c in direction x or y. Otherwise, (c,d) is a "mother" of (c',n+1). By the rules of the game of life it's easy to show every living (c,n+1) has at least one living father and at least one living mother. It follows (modulo some more details) that since the gameplay doesn't die out, there must be an infinite lifeline where each cell is a mother of the next, i.e., an infinite lifeline that never goes direction x or y. Proof of c/2 orthogonal speed limit: If a spaceship went faster than c/2, say, northward, by the lemma, it would have an infinite lifeline that never goes N or NE. The only way it could ever go northward would be to go NW. Every NW step would have to be balanced out by an eastward step (of which NE is forbidden) or the spaceship would drift west. So every northward step requires a non-northward step, QED. Proof of c/3 speed limit for diagonal: A diagonal spaceship faster than c/3, say, northeastward, would have an infinite lifeline that never goes N or NE. The only way for it to go northward would be to go NW. Each NW step would need at least two eastward steps in order for the ship to go eastward, QED.
- jessaustin 11y agoI'm no life expert, but this proof doesn't work for me. Just because there exists some configuration that doesn't generate lifelines in your chosen directions, doesn't mean that any particular configuration doesn't generate lifelines in those directions.
- xamuel 11y agoYou're mixing up where the negation goes. The lemma says that in any configuration which starts finite and never dies out, there DOES exist at least one lifeline which DOESN'T go in a forbidden direction. (There are almost certainly lots of other lifelines which do go in forbidden directions, that's fine.) An example of a lifeline in a southeastward spaceship that never goes S or SE: http://www.xamuel.com/images/lifeline.gif http://www.xamuel.com/images/lifeline.gif The proof I outlined above was published in the Elect. J. of Combinatorics (last section): http://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view/v20i1p31 http://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view...
- stcredzero 11y agoI'm thinking about writing a Conway's Life MMO, where you can activate "lanterns" that illuminate rectangles in the grid with Conway Life squares. These lanterns are fueled with "living" Conway Life cells, which are harvested by the player. Sound interesting?
- lmm 11y agoHonestly no. Building an MMO that ran entirely on life would be amazing but probably impossible. Building something that used the trappings of life without having it mean much would just be infuriating. Unless I'm misunderstanding the proposal?
- stcredzero 11y agoThe first thing that comes to mind, is that players would build glider guns that would cause live cells to "fall into" collector cells to gather resources. So it would be a farming/RTS game, except all of the crops and weapons would be emergent from Conway's Life.
- lmm 11y agoI think that's going to be unplayably difficult for anyone except serious programmers, and it will be very difficult to design life structures that have the behaviour you need to make the game fun, and even if you manage it you'll have trouble running them fast enough to perform well. I mean best of luck if you do do it, but it's going to be a real uphill struggle.
- stcredzero 11y agoYou're totally misunderstanding my proposal. (Either on purpose as a troll, or you're just having a particularly obtuse day.) The life structures you need to start would just be glider guns. The glider guns would fire into walls of "collector cells" which are not Conway Life entities, but are implemented by the game directly. Likewise, the character is not a Conway Life entity, but implemented directly by the game. I think that's going to be unplayably difficult for anyone except serious programmers What I've envisioned might well be appreciated by Life enthusiasts.
- iamwil 11y agohttps://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship-speed-in-conways-game-of-life/ https://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship-sp... This link has an animation of the c/10 spaceship.
- tommoose 11y agoIs it just me or does the original frame look like Serenity (Firefly)? It's movement is backwards though.
- jonah 11y agoI just love all the lingo in little specialized communities. orthogonal spaceship, glider, puffer, rake, loafer. "Trying to perfect a rake so it does not create Methuselah which eventually evolves into loaves, beehives and traffic lights isn't normal. But on Conway's Life, it is. Life. Not even once." - 'muzik "- Use gencols to rub the ship against gliders and *WSSs to see whether there is a useful collision to maybe build a puffer." - 'HartmutHolzwart And the excitement exhibited over this discovery. Very cool.
- sklogic 11y agoMost of the language was introduced by Conway himself, with a bit of contribution by Gardener who popularised it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]