9 ms·

Digging throught the Conway's Life rabbit hole is a fun trip back to what the WWW used to be like: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/ https://www.ics.uci.ed

by jonknee 10y ago

Digging throught the Conway's Life rabbit hole is a fun trip back to what the WWW used to be like: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/ https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/ http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html http://kaytdek.trevorshp.com/projects/computer/neuralNetworks/gameOfLife2.htm http://kaytdek.trevorshp.com/projects/computer/neuralNetwork... http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rullex_life.html http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rullex_life.html I love it!

dukoid 10y ago
My favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  VM life
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    huh? downvote? the link is a virtual machine in Conway's Game of Life.
jlarocco 10y ago
I wish the web was still like that. No advertising, no tracking, there's not 5 mb of CSS and javascript, just information presented in a readable format.
- geofft 10y ago
  Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    > Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic. There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs. Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content. > The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism. Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it. And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
    - mrkgnao 10y ago
      I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction. (Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.) If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  Every time I say something like that, someone tells me that we're better off the way things are. Tracking is BS. Ads are a great way to make my computer fetch data that I neither need nor want, and to run programs that work against my best interests using my own CPU cycles. I'm not completely convinced that we wouldn't be better off dumping the current state of the art and re-designing from first principles.
  - monsieurbanana 10y ago
    We're better off the way things are, when compared to before. I'm not saying things are perfect, or even good, but we're definitely better than before. You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. How many times do you use google per day? It lives off ads. Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Ads are certainly not the best way for us to obtain those kind of commodities, but between having them and not having anything I still choose them.
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      > You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. Saying that the ends justify the means certainly simplifies things. It's not a compelling argument to me; I suppose that I'm too much of an idealist. > Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Indeed, they do. And I use the benefit of my education to block them every way that I can, pushing the cost onto others. Without ads, or at least some kind of financial support, networks like that would fall apart. Necessity being the mother of invention, and interpersonal connections being necessary, we'd invent another solution. I like the idea of small, independent, federated social networks, but I don't know that they'd actually be practical.
  - aethertap 10y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on. I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition. 1. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
- wldcordeiro 10y ago
  Three of the linked examples aren't that readable, not that I disagree with your point.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I went through a period of intense study of cellular automata. It it a deep, deep, rabbit hole of interesting bits. One of the things I contributed early was a simple 'two species' variation where the rules for dual species were encoded in three matrices. I used it as a demo on one of the Fred Fish Amiga disks (it used pretty much every Intuition window call in the book on purpose). The clock has me thinking I need to get out my FPGA based simulator again and to hook it up to a nice 720P display :-).
- roimor 10y ago
  Could you suggest some good introductory resources for getting into CA? Is there actually some systemic way of studying this stuff?
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    Start by going to a good library and checking out the proceedings of the Artificial Life (ALIFE) conference. Read the papers and start following the references.
  - ebcode 10y ago
    "Essays on Cellular Automata" by Arthur Burks is a good starting point. Then there's the proceedings of the conference, "International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry".
  - CPLX 10y ago
    In addition to the more directly related stuff others have mentioned it's also relevant and interesting to dive into Complex Adaptive Systems literature if you have the inclination, for the classic order-from-chaos essays and discussions of emergent properties and so on.
  - MattConfluence 10y ago
    For something less academic and more "look at cool stuff" there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/
- 10y ago
chrislipa 10y ago
Glad you liked it.
akoster 10y ago
Academic institutions truly keep the spirit of the old web alive!
SuperPaintMan 10y ago
I'm surprised nobody posted smoothlife! It's a continious version of GOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I
- loxias 10y ago
  !! Cool! Thanks for this, I hadn't seen it before. A bit more than a decade ago (ugh), I wrote a plugin for Adobe Aftereffects which implemented a continuous version of GOL a whipped up on the luminance channel. Made for some really really trippy effects.

by jonknee 10y ago

dukoid 10y ago

My favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

bbcbasic 10y ago
VM life
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  huh? downvote? the link is a virtual machine in Conway's Game of Life.

jlarocco 10y ago

I wish the web was still like that. No advertising, no tracking, there's not 5 mb of CSS and javascript, just information presented in a readable format.

geofft 10y ago
Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  > Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic. There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs. Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content. > The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism. Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it. And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
  - mrkgnao 10y ago
    I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction. (Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.) If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.
khedoros1 10y ago
Every time I say something like that, someone tells me that we're better off the way things are. Tracking is BS. Ads are a great way to make my computer fetch data that I neither need nor want, and to run programs that work against my best interests using my own CPU cycles. I'm not completely convinced that we wouldn't be better off dumping the current state of the art and re-designing from first principles.
- monsieurbanana 10y ago
  We're better off the way things are, when compared to before. I'm not saying things are perfect, or even good, but we're definitely better than before. You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. How many times do you use google per day? It lives off ads. Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Ads are certainly not the best way for us to obtain those kind of commodities, but between having them and not having anything I still choose them.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    > You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. Saying that the ends justify the means certainly simplifies things. It's not a compelling argument to me; I suppose that I'm too much of an idealist. > Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Indeed, they do. And I use the benefit of my education to block them every way that I can, pushing the cost onto others. Without ads, or at least some kind of financial support, networks like that would fall apart. Necessity being the mother of invention, and interpersonal connections being necessary, we'd invent another solution. I like the idea of small, independent, federated social networks, but I don't know that they'd actually be practical.
- aethertap 10y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on. I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition. 1. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
wldcordeiro 10y ago
Three of the linked examples aren't that readable, not that I disagree with your point.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I went through a period of intense study of cellular automata. It it a deep, deep, rabbit hole of interesting bits. One of the things I contributed early was a simple 'two species' variation where the rules for dual species were encoded in three matrices. I used it as a demo on one of the Fred Fish Amiga disks (it used pretty much every Intuition window call in the book on purpose). The clock has me thinking I need to get out my FPGA based simulator again and to hook it up to a nice 720P display :-).

roimor 10y ago
Could you suggest some good introductory resources for getting into CA? Is there actually some systemic way of studying this stuff?
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Start by going to a good library and checking out the proceedings of the Artificial Life (ALIFE) conference. Read the papers and start following the references.
- ebcode 10y ago
  "Essays on Cellular Automata" by Arthur Burks is a good starting point. Then there's the proceedings of the conference, "International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry".
- CPLX 10y ago
  In addition to the more directly related stuff others have mentioned it's also relevant and interesting to dive into Complex Adaptive Systems literature if you have the inclination, for the classic order-from-chaos essays and discussions of emergent properties and so on.
- MattConfluence 10y ago
  For something less academic and more "look at cool stuff" there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/
10y ago

chrislipa 10y ago

Glad you liked it.

akoster 10y ago

Academic institutions truly keep the spirit of the old web alive!

SuperPaintMan 10y ago

I'm surprised nobody posted smoothlife! It's a continious version of GOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I

loxias 10y ago
!! Cool! Thanks for this, I hadn't seen it before. A bit more than a decade ago (ugh), I wrote a plugin for Adobe Aftereffects which implemented a continuous version of GOL a whipped up on the luminance channel. Made for some really really trippy effects.