14 ms·

Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s

703 points by seszett 9y ago

wallnuss 9y ago
The only sad part of this story is the design was meant to celebrate John Conway and his Game of Life [1] (Conway actually was a lecturer at Cambridge, when he introduced GoL). [1] From 2014: http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-view/view/cambridge-science-park-station-to-incorporate-game-of-life.html http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-vie...
- szemet 9y ago
  cladding which is derived from John Horton Conway's 'Game of Life' Strange that no one was there to tell them they are wrong. Anyway, how could they get it wrong in the age of Internet? Every bit of information about 'Game of Life' is one click away... :( Agree - that's sad...
  - damnyou 9y ago
    Do you really, really, really think the architects didn't do their homework? Can you think of no other possible explanation they went with rule 30 and not GoL?
    - szemet 9y ago
      Like what? They decided meanwhile that they would like to celebrate Wolfram instead? Or is there any artistic value to celebrate someone with other persons achievements? Some kind of twisted post-modern artistic message about authorship? Or it looks better for them? For example: lets pay tribute to Amundsen reaching the South pole with polar bear images (because they are so cute)? By Occam razor: ignorance is the best explanation. ;)
      - damnyou 9y ago
        Maybe they tested both and found one more aesthetically pleasing? Maybe Game of Life simply doesn't produce patterns as interesting as Rule 30? With GoL you can only show one generation. Maybe they were going for the randomness that rule 30 provides (you can build a PRNG from it) but Game of Life doesn't? http://aperiodical.com/2017/05/right-answer-for-the-wrong-reason-cellular-automaton-on-the-new-cambridge-north-station/#comment-780944 http://aperiodical.com/2017/05/right-answer-for-the-wrong-re... They're professionals like you. Give them some credit.
        szemet 9y ago
        Ok. So they are not ignorant or stupid, but have a twisted value system? Imagine that you go to a Shakespeare festival but they only recite T. S. Eliot. When you are disappointed, they say: "Look these are all poems. They are very similar on the surface, but Eliot somehow sounds better to the modern ear. Long live Shakespeare!"
        damnyou 9y ago
        No, they got the order to make something that looks like GoL. They tried it out, realized it didn't look great, then looked for what most people who don't have a CS degree would consider similar enough and also looked nice. This sort of reasonable compromise happens all the time. In the software industry, if you picked ideological purity over pragmatism you wouldn't be a great engineer. You may have a point if this was a museum celebrating Conway, but it isn't.
        mnsc 9y ago
        If they have a sign somewhere in the train station explaining the panels and how they "celebrate GoL" with an explanation of that algorithm then I would have an issue. But I agree that a static image of, ie a 77P6H1V1 wouldn't be a good representation of how it looks when flying. Static: http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png Animated: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1 http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1
    - veli_joza 9y ago
      Maybe they didn't want gun patterns for safety reasons :) But seriously, static patterns work better for medium that is architecture. I just find it so ironic that Wolfram thought this is homage to HIS work. Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts?
      - Grue3 9y ago
        I mean it's literally a pattern from Wolfram's cellular automaton, even Conway himself wouldn't think it represents Game of Life.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
        Not in this one, for sure ... That is one damn insecure guy.
      - scrumper 9y ago
        He didn't say once in the entire article that he thought it was a homage to his work. He simply said it used his favorite rule. Everything he writes is about the beauty of this part of the 'computational universe', about giving the architects credit for choosing a pattern which blocks on average 50% of the light, about how they could potentially have extended the work to use more of the pattern. It's a very interesting article with very little of SW's infamous blow-hardiness in it. In other words, no "Wow Cambridge honored me and my amazing automata!", lots of "These patterns I've loved for years are on a building and that is really exciting."
      - xrange 9y ago
        >Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts? For "A New Kind of Science", here is the index entry: Conway, John H. (England/USA, 1937- ) and arithmetic recurrences, 1115 and Game of Life, 877, 880, 949 and iterated run-length encoding, 905 and non-periodic tilings, 943 in Preface, xiii and recursive sequences, 907 and universality of Life, 1117 https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/index/names/a-e.php?SearchIndex=Conway%2C%20John%20H.#searchword1/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/index/names/a-e.php?Searc...
    - xrange 9y ago
      Mistakes have been known to happen, like carving the wrong value for pi into a wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_MAX_Station#Elevators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_MAX_Station#El...
  - anonymfus 9y ago
    May be they consulted with Stephen Wolfram.
  - chillingeffect 9y ago
    I went to school with architects of the aesthetic variety (vs. the keep your family dry with a good roof variety). 1. To their way of thinking, what we think of as "superclasses" are more like classes to them. i.e. They see little difference between GoL and Rule 30. They are essentially the same to them. The aesthetics are similar and the process is similar. Most importantly, the intention or thought process which produced the technique is almost identical. I like the example below about Eliot vs. Shakespeare, although it's a bit overblown. I don't think architects would go so far as to conflate an entire museum to the entire works of two different individual's lives, especially when the two had such differing approaches to playwrighting. YET, conflating variants of two individuals' algorithms is within their scope, clumsy as it is. 2. Furthermore, architecture is an unclean collusion of politics, aesthetics and technique. It's very difficult for all three of these parties to have the same vision. Errors get amplified. White lies persist to save feelings, face and budgets. 3. In conclusion, yes they are wrong and intellectually lazy, and emotionally fearful about making it right. That brings me to my last point about architecture: Once it's erected, it's generally there to stay, baby. A bird in the hand. This is why architecture is so valuable to politicians. On three fronts: it's protection in the form of walls. It's production in the form of moving people where they need to go. It's influence in the form of symbolic power which will dominate the thinking of all those who pass through those walls. For many years. Who can argue against the triumph of digital patterns in shaping our generation? Even though we're right, we're right like Big Bang Theory characters. No one wants to agree with us, because we're subordinate to the power of architecture (as leveraged by state politics). Our objections are a cute footnote on a museum tour for your aunt to amaze you with on a holiday weekend :)
    - patcon 9y ago
      Very nicely said! I really enjoyed your comment :)
  - posterboy 9y ago
    It's not really wrong, because GoL is Turing Complete.
  - brenschluss 9y ago
    That's because this is, like a commentator below said, a mix of aesthetics, politics, and technique. As an architect and software developer I will bet my hat that the architects knew exactly what was going on, but said that it was based on the GoL precisely because it would pass the budget. I wouldn't be surprised if it started out with the GoL, but, thanks to budget reasons, they were forced to fabricate multiple identical panels rather than a total unique facade, and switched to a CA. Fabricating/plasma cutting such a facade would be hugely pricey and the only thing that would let it survive against a bottom line budget is a political reason - aka a talking point.
    - chris_va 9y ago
      waterjet, probably, and I don't think it would be too pricey since you can stack many sheets.
      - brenschluss 9y ago
        Good call, But pricey than the alternative, which is to not cut a pattern at all, or to cut a unique pattern. Also, at this kind of scale, people easily balk at a reasonable sum; if it costs, say, $100 to waterjet one 4'x8' sheet, then a facade at 20'x40' on 4 sides of a building is all of a sudden a $320k budget.
- qf303rjr3 9y ago
  Who's to say that it isn't a pattern from Game of Life? You can set up the initial configuration however you like.
  - szemet 9y ago
    Yeah that's the problem with unconstrained things: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 (Ok-ok, I know it is just a fun comment, but just to be serious anyway for the sake of truth: you can think of how likely that this is a GoL pattern: take the set of all imaginable GoL patterns, at all timestep, and check how frequent is this subpattern then, compared to some combination of some common/well-know patterns, like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Examples_of_patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Exampl... )
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    There's a thing called a "Garden of Eden" configuration that has no predecessors, which is impossible to get to from any other possible state. For a rule like Life, there are many possible configurations that must have been created by God or somebody with a bitmap editor (or somebody who thinks he's God and uses Mathematica as a bitmap editor, like Stephen Wolfram ;), because it would have been impossible for the Life rule to evolve into those states. For example, with the "Life" rule, no possible configuration of cells could ever evolve into all cells with the value "1". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_automaton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom... For a rule that simply sets the cell value to zero, all configurations other than pure zeros are garden of eden states, and they all lead directly into a one step attractor of all zeros which always evolves back into itself, all zeros again and again (the shortest possible attractor loop that leads directly to itself). There is a way of graphically visualizing that global rule state space, which gives insight into the behavior of the rule and the texture and complexity of its state space! Andrew Wuensche and Mike Lesser published a gorgeous coffee table book entitled "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata" that plots out the possible "Garden of Eden" states and the "Basins of Attraction" they lead into of many different one-dimensional cellular automata like rule 30. http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html The beautiful color plates begin on page 79 in the free pdf file: http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dynamics_of_CA.pdf http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dyn... I've uploaded the money shots to imgur: http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz Those are not pictures of 1-d cellular automata rule cell states on a grid themselves, but they are actually graphs of the abstract global state space, showing merging and looping trajectories (but not branching since the rules are deterministic -- time flows from the garden of eden leaf tips around the perimeter into (then around) the basin of attractor loops in the center, merging like springs (GOE) into tributaries into rivers into the ocean (BOA)). The rest of the book is an atlas of all possible 1-d rules of a particular rule numbering system (like rule 30, etc), and the last image is the legend. He developed a technique of computing and plotting the topology network of all possible states a CA can get into -- tips are "garden of eden" states that no other states can lead to, and loops are "basins of attraction". Here is the illustration of "rule 30" from page 144 (the legend explaining it is the last photo in the above album). [I am presuming it's using the same rule numbering system as Wolfram but I'm not sure -- EDIT: I visually checked the "space time pattern from a singleton seed" thumbnail against the illustration in the article, and yes it matches rule 30!] http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata introduces a powerful new perspective for the study of discrete dynamical systems. After first looking at the unique trajectory of a system's future, an algoritm is presented that directly computes the multiple merging trajectories of the systems past. A given cellular automaton will "crystallize" state space into a set of basins of attraction that typically have a topology of trees rooted on attractor cycles. Portraits of these objects are made accessible through computer generated graphics. The "Atlas" presents a complete class of such objects, and is inteded , with the accompanying software, as an aid to navigation into the vast reaches of rule behaviour space. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in cellular automata, complex systems, computational theory, artificial life, neural networks, and aspects of genetics." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor "Basins of attraction in cellular automata", by Andrew Wuensche: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/08)5:6%3C19::AID-CPLX5%3E3.0.CO;2-J/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/... "To achieve the global perspective. I devised a general method for running CA backwards in time to compute a state's predecessors with a direct reverse algorithm. So the predecessors of predecessors, and so on, can be computed, revealing the complete subtree including the "leaves," states without predecessors, the so-called “garden-of-Eden" states. Trajectories must lead to attractors in a finite CA, so a basin of attraction is composed of merging trajectories, trees, rooted on the states making up the attractor cycle with a period of one or more. State-space is organized by the "physics" underlying the dynamic behavior into a number of these basins of attraction, making up the basin of attraction field."
- Isamu 9y ago
  I choose to think of it as the Game of Life simulating rule 30, but zoomed way out. Or maybe this is a joke at Wolfram's expense, attributing one of his own to Conway.
- splawn 9y ago
  I think it is funny, Conway doesn't really enjoy being solely associated with GOL and the fame it brings[0].. In stark contrast with Wolfram's ego. Perhaps this arrangement actually works out best for both of them. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA
- doetoe 9y ago
  I guess it is because GoL is 2D, so you cannot visualize the dynamics in 2D, you could just show a single generation. Instead they went for an interesting looking simple 1D cellular automaton.
GuiA 9y ago
So... who're the architect(s) for the station? How did they go about laying the tiling on that facade, programming the CNC to cut the pattern in the aluminium, etc.? Sounds like there are probably some interesting people behind it all.
- logicallee 9y ago
  In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram made the bold conjecture that the whole universe might be a cellular automaton. So there doesn't necessarily have to be a designer: it could just be part of the fabric of the universe itself, just as he breathtakingly predicted! I mean, he wasn't really thinking of train stations when he wrote that, it's not exactly the validation he would have liked... but I think at this point he'll take what he can get :) - EDIT: downvotes but I thought this was funny :)
  - amelius 9y ago
    Did Wolfram give any clue about how e.g. relativity may emerge from a cellular automaton?
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I think he might have. It's been a long time since I read his book, but see here: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physics/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physi.... I also remember reading elsewhere that e.g. speed of light (as a finite information speed limit) limit emerges straight out of casual networks generalized to be continuous instead of discrete.
    - Jach 9y ago
      Which relativity? :) No idea about Wolfram but special relativity doesn't need very many assumptions; you can do it if all you assume are causal sets and a quantification scheme: https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4172 https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4172 And since Conway's GoL is Turing-complete, you could maybe construct something using the Strong Church–Turing thesis.
Will_Parker 9y ago
I've long been a fan of Wolfram's ideas. But I wish he could write a single thing without most of it being about: how great he is, and how he has supposedly made the most progress in history with a cognitive step from already explored cellular automata. It's not even that I'm that bothered by the arrogance, it's just repetitive and boring.
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  It's pretty ceaseless, too, down to the names he gives everything (his name).
- flukus 9y ago
  At least this was relatively to the point, whenever I've read something from him in the past it's more like a 72 page treatise on cellular automata followed by the two line grilled cheese sandwich review the title promised.
- Radim 9y ago
  Wolfram reminds me of Richard Feynman, in that sense. The first time I tried to read "Surely You're Joking" as a kid I had to put it down -- the incessant "ME! ME! ME!" dripping from every page was a little too much. I've since mellowed down and can read Feynman or Wolfram without any issues. I even enjoy that style now :-)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    4/3 I's per paragraph
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - pocketsquare2 9y ago
    The first time I tried to read a Feynman Diagram as a kid I had to put it down -- the incessant "ME! ME! ME!" dripping from every subatomic particle was a little too much.
flavio81 9y ago
One of the most coolest posts i've seen lately. I did not know such patterns were also present in antique art. I guess one learns a cool thing every day !
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Well look into Ancient Greeks they were already relating beauty and math. Hard to say where it came out first but they started noticing patterns in music and from there to associating art to mathematical proportion was a short step
symmetricsaurus 9y ago
James Grime (of, perhaps, Numberphile fame) made a video about it [1]. He also talks about how it's supposed to be related to Conway's game of life but is actually not (Conway's game of life is a 2D cellular automaton, while rule 30 is 1D). [1]: https://youtu.be/aeyhnrZvQBE https://youtu.be/aeyhnrZvQBE
- sova 9y ago
  Rule 30 is 1D? Could you please elaborate on what you mean?
  - LukeShu 9y ago
    The pictures you're looking at, one of the axes is time. One row "becomes" the row below it. Each time-step iteration adds a row to the bottom, while the rows above it are immutable (because they are in the past).
    - munificent 9y ago
      This leads to the natural follow-up question: You can take a 2D automaton like Conway's Game of Life and turn time into a third dimension, giving you a single static volume. Has anyone tried doing that and 3D printing it?
      - mcpherrinm 9y ago
        I found https://www.wired.com/2014/10/3-d-printed-shoes-generated-using-conways-game-life/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/3-d-printed-shoes-generated-us... which seems cool Perhaps easier than 3D printing would be stacked laser-cut acrylic sheets. You could use transparent and partially opaque colors for dead and live cells, which lets you see the interior 3D structures more clearly than purely opaque 3D printed structures. I think the optical quality would likely be a lot better than anything I've seen 3d printed. I'm interested enough in this idea to see if I can come up with some interesting figures to make.
alkonaut 9y ago
We get it - cellular automata. This would have been an interesting article if he had tracked the artist/architects, interviewed them and asked them how they ended up with these patterns, what tools they used etc. Instead it's the same endless blabber about the damn automata we have heard for the last 20 years.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Well they do make nice PRNGs.
- jdironman 9y ago
  Why do multiples of '512' using the Wolfram alpha automata panels show dark gray canvases? (For example, 512,1024,2048, etc...) https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/sw-blog/capanels https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/sw-blog/capanels
vbuwivbiu 9y ago
the implication being that this railway station will accelerate human evolution the way the monolith in 2001 did
mturmon 9y ago
You can make some pretty fun tilings out of Penrose tiles as well. My wife and I made a ceramic-tile headboard out of the Penrose P2 tiling (an aperiodic tiling) that looks quite lovely - the tiles, being handmade, avoid sterility. Like the patterns in the OP, they have recurring themes, but don't fully repeat.
- rurban 9y ago
  Penrose tilings would look much better, yes. They are proven to be aperiodic. Penrose' alma mater was St.John's in Cambridge but then he switched to be professor at Oxford, in the south. So they cannot really put Penrose tilings on a Cambridge station. There's huge rivalry between those two cities. But how could they fuck up Conway with Wolfram tilings? Wolfram went to St.John's in Oxford and then moved to California. No Cambridge there. Conway's alma mater was in Cambridge and then he became professor in Princeton, USA. Penrose has the same affiliations as Conway, the only problem is that Penrose stayed in the UK and went to Oxford.
  - jamessb 9y ago
    There is a 'Penrose Paving' outside the new Mathematical Institue in Oxford (the Andrew Wiles building), which opened in 2013. There's a video of Roger Penrose talking about it [1], and a time-lapse of it being laid [2]. [1]: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/865 https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/865 [3]: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/our-building https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/our-building
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  Has the patent expired? https://morris.cymru/2009/01/penroses-patent-and-the-battle-of-the-tissue-tiles-contains-mathematics/ https://morris.cymru/2009/01/penroses-patent-and-the-battle-...
sova 9y ago
Uncanny and amazing
kaundur 9y ago
If anyones interested I wrote some JS to view states 0 to 255 in canvas. http://www.kaundur.com/jekyll/update/2016/10/31/cellular-automaton.html http://www.kaundur.com/jekyll/update/2016/10/31/cellular-aut...
ncw33 9y ago
Brilliant spot! I hadn't read that in the local papers - there was simply criticism of the 'boxy' design. I live right by that station, and used it for the first time this weekend (only a few days after it opened) and my wife and I commented on the attractive appearance of it. Despite some controversies (are there enough ticket machines, enough toilets, enough train services, and so on...) Cambridge North is going to become a popular station.
graycat 9y ago
Very nice!
jsat 9y ago
Fantastic post. Opened me up to some mathematics I didn't know about. But please Wolf, these pictures are tiny.
mtgx 9y ago
A somewhat relevant "theory of everything" in a TED video from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy4t_zAJJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy4t_zAJJ4
GlennS 9y ago
Anyone know the origin of the 22,000 BC pattern? I had no idea anyone was making such impressively detailed masonry that far back. The Sumerian columns with geometric mosaics are pretty cool too.
fjfaase 9y ago
Maybe, the should have used one of the many repeating Rule 30 patterns: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Rule30.html http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Rule30.html
lanbanger 9y ago
Just a shame there are no direct trains to or from London to Cambridge North, eh?!
- justincormack 9y ago
  There are. Even some reasonably fast ones, the fast train I got from London to Cambridge was stopping there next stop just the other day.
DonHopkins 9y ago
The walls along 101 through a stretch of Menlo Park have error diffusion dither patterns on them that I enjoy. Or at least it looks like an error diffusion dither and not a cellular automata to me, because it seems like a gradient, somewhat random, sparse, spread out, and not deterministic enough to be a cellular automata rule. https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA,+USA/@37.5866956,-122.3351576,3a,60y,139.98h,73.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1seu87WgEP76Ga7rNOYuN6mQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa6b1117280ff:0xebbf998e5df289ab!8m2!3d37.4529598!4d-122.1817252 https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA,+USA/@37.586... Here's a few layers of cellular automata (anneal, life and brian) combined with some error diffusion dithered heat flow, for your enjoyment (try clicking and dragging and spinning the mouse wheel): http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/ http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/
- pvg 9y ago
  What exactly is going on in the second link?
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    The doc's in the comments! ;) https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
    - pvg 9y ago
      Sweet, thanks. Without digging up the book, am I reading this right that this isn't a memoized algorithm like Hashlife, it's just that Javascript got that stupidly fast?
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        JavaScript got unexpectedly inconceivably stupidly fast. That code is not at all optimized (except that it tries to use efficient algorithms), and is very data driven and dynamically parametrizable with dictionaries, yet somehow it still runs really fast! JavaScript optimization is the new moon shot. It can emulate the CAM6 hardware, which uses look-up tables pre-computed from FORTH (now JavaScript) functions, which don't need to be optimized because they're run once over all possible inputs to generate the table, instead of for every cell of every frame. The trade-offs of hardware and software have changed a lot, and it's more than fast enough, so I optimized for readability and flexibility. It can run CAM6-compatible (but limited) lookup table based rules (for von Neumann, Moore and Margolus neighborhoods), and also run arbitrarily complex and multi-layered rules in JavaScript, that compute the cell value directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cellular_automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cellular_automaton The rules can be parameterized by dictionaries (including stuff like like simple numeric parameters, or arrays of convolution kernels, or additional lookup tables) that you can tweak while it's running. (The CAM6 lookup table isn't related to hashlife -- it's simply indexed by concatenating all the bits of the neighborhood together to make a binary number indexing into the table of next states -- that's what the CAM6 hardware did directly at 60 frames a second, on a 256x256 matrix, of 8 bits per cell.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam-6 CAM-6 Forth source code: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt Rudy Rucker writes about his CAM-6 in the CelLab manual: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html Computer science is still so new that many of the people at the cutting edge have come from other fields. Though Toffoli holds degrees in physics and computer science, Bennett's Ph.D. is in physical chemistry. And twenty-nine year old Margolus is still a graduate student in physics, his dissertation delayed by the work of inventing, with Toffoli, the CAM-6 Cellular Automaton Machine. After watching the CAM in operation at Margolus's office, I am sure the thing will be a hit. Just as the Moog synthesizer changed the sound of music, cellular automata will change the look of video. I tell this to Toffoli and Margolus, and they look unconcerned. What they care most deeply about is science, about Edward Fredkin's vision of explaining the world in terms of cellular automata and information mechanics. Margolus talks about computer hackers, and how a successful program is called “a good hack.” As the unbelievably bizarre cellular automata images flash by on his screen, Margolus leans back in his chair and smiles slyly. And then he tells me his conception of the world we live in. “The universe is a good hack.” [...] Margolus and Toffoli's CAM-6 board was finally coming into production around then, and I got the Department to order one. The company making the boards was Systems Concepts of San Francisco; I think they cost $1500. We put our order in, and I started phoning Systems Concepts up and asking them when I was going to get my board. By then I'd gotten a copy of Margolus and Toffoli's book, Cellular Automata Machines, and I was itching to start playing with the board. And still it didn't come. Finally I told System Concepts that SJSU was going to have to cancel the purchase order. The next week they sent the board. By now it was August, 1987. The packaging of the board was kind of incredible. It came naked, all by itself, in a plastic bag in a small box of styrofoam peanuts. No cables, no software, no documentation. Just a three inch by twelve inch rectangle of plastic—actually two rectangles one on top of the other—completely covered with computer chips. There were two sockets at one end. I called Systems Concepts again, and they sent me a few pages of documentation. You were supposed to put a cable running your graphics card's output into the CAM-6 board, and then plug your monitor cable into the CAM-6's other socket. No, Systems Concepts didn't have any cables, they were waiting for a special kind of cable from Asia. So Steve Ware, one of the SJSU Math&CS Department techs, made me a cable. All I needed then was the software to drive the board, and as soon as I phoned Toffoli he sent me a copy. Starting to write programs for the CAM-6 took a little bit of time because the language it uses is Forth. This is an offbeat computer language that uses reverse Polish notation. Once you get used to it, Forth is very clean and nice, but it makes you worry about things you shouldn't really have to worry about. But, hey, if I needed to know Forth to see cellular automata, then by God I'd know Forth. I picked it up fast and spent the next four or five months hacking the CAM-6. The big turning point came in October, when I was invited to Hackers 3.0, the 1987 edition of the great annual Hackers' conference held at a camp near Saratoga, CA. I got invited thanks to James Blinn, a graphics wizard who also happens to be a fan of my science fiction books. As a relative novice to computing, I felt a little diffident showing up at Hackers, but everyone there was really nice. It was like, “Come on in! The more the merrier! We're having fun, yeeeeee-haw!” I brought my AT along with the CAM-6 in it, and did demos all night long. People were blown away by the images, though not too many of them sounded like they were ready to a) cough up $1500, b) beg Systems Concepts for delivery, and c) learn Forth in order to use a CAM-6 themselves. A bunch of the hackers made me take the board out of my computer and let them look at it. Not knowing too much about hardware, I'd imagined all along that the CAM-6 had some special processors on it. But the hackers informed me that all it really had was a few latches and a lot of fast RAM memory chips.
eternalban 9y ago
This guy really thinks he invented cellular automata.
laszlokorte 9y ago
the fashion online shop asos.com also uses a pattern that looks like a cellular automaton for it's packaging: https://twitter.com/laurenadams7/status/632178492503912448 https://twitter.com/laurenadams7/status/632178492503912448
peeters 9y ago
I'm pretty new to CA, so I found this really useful in giving some necessary background to the algorithm and what a "rule" is: http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-7-cellular-automata/ http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-7-cellular-automata/
posterboy 9y ago
That the author would focus purely on his PoV fits with what I read about the author's character. I was reading and wondering why he wouldn't inquire and link to an official statement.
- api 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
- dang 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467718 and marked it off-topic.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > That the author would focus purely on his PoV fits with "this being a casual blog.", I believe is how that sentence is supposed to end.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    a 1000 word article doesn't quite strike me as casual.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      The length seems pretty typical to me. Most of the text actually goes to explaining pictures.
dannyking 9y ago
I made a set of ten cellular automata posters for my office wall y'all might like! Let me know if you'd like me to send out some high res versions. https://imgur.com/a/cz7V2 https://imgur.com/a/cz7V2
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Those are beautiful.
  - dannyking 9y ago
    Thanks! Made them using Processing.org then printed them in high resolution for the wall. Turned out really nicely!
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
How many human beings on the planet could have seen that pattern, realized it was familiar, and then figured out what it was? It's like an inside practical joke, or, the ultimate Easter Egg.
- Retra 9y ago
  Lots of people. That's why Wolfram kept getting requests to identify it. That's why the building was designed with that pattern. It's not like there's anything particularly obscure here.
  - 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
    Hmm. This is a train station, yes? What % of people transiting the station see that pattern and think, 'Oh, that's a cellular automata.'. Clearly more than zero, and perhaps it's not considered obscure by HN readers, but likely a very, very small % of passengers will recognize what it is. Wolfram himself seemed to be surprised.
    - Retra 9y ago
      I guess I just got the sense from your post that it would take a 1-in-6-billion person to recognize the pattern rather than something more realistic like 1-in-ten-thousand.
temp246810 9y ago
This is the quintessential hacker news post, IMO. A topic that on the surface seems run of the mill (a train station) Technical in its essence Authored by someone notable (in this case really notable, which is not a requirement) My comment on the other hand, not in the spirit of the discussions on HN but I like to celebrate good posts when I see them.

703 points by seszett 9y ago

The only sad part of this story is the design was meant to celebrate John Conway and his Game of Life [1] (Conway actually was a lecturer at Cambridge, when he introduced GoL). [1] From 2014: http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-view/view/cambridge-science-park-station-to-incorporate-game-of-life.html http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-vie...

szemet 9y ago
cladding which is derived from John Horton Conway's 'Game of Life' Strange that no one was there to tell them they are wrong. Anyway, how could they get it wrong in the age of Internet? Every bit of information about 'Game of Life' is one click away... :( Agree - that's sad...
- damnyou 9y ago
  Do you really, really, really think the architects didn't do their homework? Can you think of no other possible explanation they went with rule 30 and not GoL?
  - szemet 9y ago
    Like what? They decided meanwhile that they would like to celebrate Wolfram instead? Or is there any artistic value to celebrate someone with other persons achievements? Some kind of twisted post-modern artistic message about authorship? Or it looks better for them? For example: lets pay tribute to Amundsen reaching the South pole with polar bear images (because they are so cute)? By Occam razor: ignorance is the best explanation. ;)
    - damnyou 9y ago
      Maybe they tested both and found one more aesthetically pleasing? Maybe Game of Life simply doesn't produce patterns as interesting as Rule 30? With GoL you can only show one generation. Maybe they were going for the randomness that rule 30 provides (you can build a PRNG from it) but Game of Life doesn't? http://aperiodical.com/2017/05/right-answer-for-the-wrong-reason-cellular-automaton-on-the-new-cambridge-north-station/#comment-780944 http://aperiodical.com/2017/05/right-answer-for-the-wrong-re... They're professionals like you. Give them some credit.
      - szemet 9y ago
        Ok. So they are not ignorant or stupid, but have a twisted value system? Imagine that you go to a Shakespeare festival but they only recite T. S. Eliot. When you are disappointed, they say: "Look these are all poems. They are very similar on the surface, but Eliot somehow sounds better to the modern ear. Long live Shakespeare!"
        damnyou 9y ago
        No, they got the order to make something that looks like GoL. They tried it out, realized it didn't look great, then looked for what most people who don't have a CS degree would consider similar enough and also looked nice. This sort of reasonable compromise happens all the time. In the software industry, if you picked ideological purity over pragmatism you wouldn't be a great engineer. You may have a point if this was a museum celebrating Conway, but it isn't.
        mnsc 9y ago
        If they have a sign somewhere in the train station explaining the panels and how they "celebrate GoL" with an explanation of that algorithm then I would have an issue. But I agree that a static image of, ie a 77P6H1V1 wouldn't be a good representation of how it looks when flying. Static: http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png Animated: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1 http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1
  - veli_joza 9y ago
    Maybe they didn't want gun patterns for safety reasons :) But seriously, static patterns work better for medium that is architecture. I just find it so ironic that Wolfram thought this is homage to HIS work. Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts?
    - Grue3 9y ago
      I mean it's literally a pattern from Wolfram's cellular automaton, even Conway himself wouldn't think it represents Game of Life.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
      Not in this one, for sure ... That is one damn insecure guy.
    - scrumper 9y ago
      He didn't say once in the entire article that he thought it was a homage to his work. He simply said it used his favorite rule. Everything he writes is about the beauty of this part of the 'computational universe', about giving the architects credit for choosing a pattern which blocks on average 50% of the light, about how they could potentially have extended the work to use more of the pattern. It's a very interesting article with very little of SW's infamous blow-hardiness in it. In other words, no "Wow Cambridge honored me and my amazing automata!", lots of "These patterns I've loved for years are on a building and that is really exciting."
    - xrange 9y ago
      >Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts? For "A New Kind of Science", here is the index entry: Conway, John H. (England/USA, 1937- ) and arithmetic recurrences, 1115 and Game of Life, 877, 880, 949 and iterated run-length encoding, 905 and non-periodic tilings, 943 in Preface, xiii and recursive sequences, 907 and universality of Life, 1117 https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/index/names/a-e.php?SearchIndex=Conway%2C%20John%20H.#searchword1/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/index/names/a-e.php?Searc...
  - xrange 9y ago
    Mistakes have been known to happen, like carving the wrong value for pi into a wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_MAX_Station#Elevators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_MAX_Station#El...
- anonymfus 9y ago
  May be they consulted with Stephen Wolfram.
- chillingeffect 9y ago
  I went to school with architects of the aesthetic variety (vs. the keep your family dry with a good roof variety). 1. To their way of thinking, what we think of as "superclasses" are more like classes to them. i.e. They see little difference between GoL and Rule 30. They are essentially the same to them. The aesthetics are similar and the process is similar. Most importantly, the intention or thought process which produced the technique is almost identical. I like the example below about Eliot vs. Shakespeare, although it's a bit overblown. I don't think architects would go so far as to conflate an entire museum to the entire works of two different individual's lives, especially when the two had such differing approaches to playwrighting. YET, conflating variants of two individuals' algorithms is within their scope, clumsy as it is. 2. Furthermore, architecture is an unclean collusion of politics, aesthetics and technique. It's very difficult for all three of these parties to have the same vision. Errors get amplified. White lies persist to save feelings, face and budgets. 3. In conclusion, yes they are wrong and intellectually lazy, and emotionally fearful about making it right. That brings me to my last point about architecture: Once it's erected, it's generally there to stay, baby. A bird in the hand. This is why architecture is so valuable to politicians. On three fronts: it's protection in the form of walls. It's production in the form of moving people where they need to go. It's influence in the form of symbolic power which will dominate the thinking of all those who pass through those walls. For many years. Who can argue against the triumph of digital patterns in shaping our generation? Even though we're right, we're right like Big Bang Theory characters. No one wants to agree with us, because we're subordinate to the power of architecture (as leveraged by state politics). Our objections are a cute footnote on a museum tour for your aunt to amaze you with on a holiday weekend :)
  - patcon 9y ago
    Very nicely said! I really enjoyed your comment :)
- posterboy 9y ago
  It's not really wrong, because GoL is Turing Complete.
- brenschluss 9y ago
  That's because this is, like a commentator below said, a mix of aesthetics, politics, and technique. As an architect and software developer I will bet my hat that the architects knew exactly what was going on, but said that it was based on the GoL precisely because it would pass the budget. I wouldn't be surprised if it started out with the GoL, but, thanks to budget reasons, they were forced to fabricate multiple identical panels rather than a total unique facade, and switched to a CA. Fabricating/plasma cutting such a facade would be hugely pricey and the only thing that would let it survive against a bottom line budget is a political reason - aka a talking point.
  - chris_va 9y ago
    waterjet, probably, and I don't think it would be too pricey since you can stack many sheets.
    - brenschluss 9y ago
      Good call, But pricey than the alternative, which is to not cut a pattern at all, or to cut a unique pattern. Also, at this kind of scale, people easily balk at a reasonable sum; if it costs, say, $100 to waterjet one 4'x8' sheet, then a facade at 20'x40' on 4 sides of a building is all of a sudden a $320k budget.
qf303rjr3 9y ago
Who's to say that it isn't a pattern from Game of Life? You can set up the initial configuration however you like.
- szemet 9y ago
  Yeah that's the problem with unconstrained things: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 (Ok-ok, I know it is just a fun comment, but just to be serious anyway for the sake of truth: you can think of how likely that this is a GoL pattern: take the set of all imaginable GoL patterns, at all timestep, and check how frequent is this subpattern then, compared to some combination of some common/well-know patterns, like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Examples_of_patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Exampl... )
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  There's a thing called a "Garden of Eden" configuration that has no predecessors, which is impossible to get to from any other possible state. For a rule like Life, there are many possible configurations that must have been created by God or somebody with a bitmap editor (or somebody who thinks he's God and uses Mathematica as a bitmap editor, like Stephen Wolfram ;), because it would have been impossible for the Life rule to evolve into those states. For example, with the "Life" rule, no possible configuration of cells could ever evolve into all cells with the value "1". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_automaton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom... For a rule that simply sets the cell value to zero, all configurations other than pure zeros are garden of eden states, and they all lead directly into a one step attractor of all zeros which always evolves back into itself, all zeros again and again (the shortest possible attractor loop that leads directly to itself). There is a way of graphically visualizing that global rule state space, which gives insight into the behavior of the rule and the texture and complexity of its state space! Andrew Wuensche and Mike Lesser published a gorgeous coffee table book entitled "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata" that plots out the possible "Garden of Eden" states and the "Basins of Attraction" they lead into of many different one-dimensional cellular automata like rule 30. http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html The beautiful color plates begin on page 79 in the free pdf file: http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dynamics_of_CA.pdf http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dyn... I've uploaded the money shots to imgur: http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz Those are not pictures of 1-d cellular automata rule cell states on a grid themselves, but they are actually graphs of the abstract global state space, showing merging and looping trajectories (but not branching since the rules are deterministic -- time flows from the garden of eden leaf tips around the perimeter into (then around) the basin of attractor loops in the center, merging like springs (GOE) into tributaries into rivers into the ocean (BOA)). The rest of the book is an atlas of all possible 1-d rules of a particular rule numbering system (like rule 30, etc), and the last image is the legend. He developed a technique of computing and plotting the topology network of all possible states a CA can get into -- tips are "garden of eden" states that no other states can lead to, and loops are "basins of attraction". Here is the illustration of "rule 30" from page 144 (the legend explaining it is the last photo in the above album). [I am presuming it's using the same rule numbering system as Wolfram but I'm not sure -- EDIT: I visually checked the "space time pattern from a singleton seed" thumbnail against the illustration in the article, and yes it matches rule 30!] http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata introduces a powerful new perspective for the study of discrete dynamical systems. After first looking at the unique trajectory of a system's future, an algoritm is presented that directly computes the multiple merging trajectories of the systems past. A given cellular automaton will "crystallize" state space into a set of basins of attraction that typically have a topology of trees rooted on attractor cycles. Portraits of these objects are made accessible through computer generated graphics. The "Atlas" presents a complete class of such objects, and is inteded , with the accompanying software, as an aid to navigation into the vast reaches of rule behaviour space. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in cellular automata, complex systems, computational theory, artificial life, neural networks, and aspects of genetics." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor "Basins of attraction in cellular automata", by Andrew Wuensche: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/08)5:6%3C19::AID-CPLX5%3E3.0.CO;2-J/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/... "To achieve the global perspective. I devised a general method for running CA backwards in time to compute a state's predecessors with a direct reverse algorithm. So the predecessors of predecessors, and so on, can be computed, revealing the complete subtree including the "leaves," states without predecessors, the so-called “garden-of-Eden" states. Trajectories must lead to attractors in a finite CA, so a basin of attraction is composed of merging trajectories, trees, rooted on the states making up the attractor cycle with a period of one or more. State-space is organized by the "physics" underlying the dynamic behavior into a number of these basins of attraction, making up the basin of attraction field."
Isamu 9y ago
I choose to think of it as the Game of Life simulating rule 30, but zoomed way out. Or maybe this is a joke at Wolfram's expense, attributing one of his own to Conway.
splawn 9y ago
I think it is funny, Conway doesn't really enjoy being solely associated with GOL and the fame it brings[0].. In stark contrast with Wolfram's ego. Perhaps this arrangement actually works out best for both of them. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA
doetoe 9y ago
I guess it is because GoL is 2D, so you cannot visualize the dynamics in 2D, you could just show a single generation. Instead they went for an interesting looking simple 1D cellular automaton.

GuiA 9y ago

So... who're the architect(s) for the station? How did they go about laying the tiling on that facade, programming the CNC to cut the pattern in the aluminium, etc.? Sounds like there are probably some interesting people behind it all.

logicallee 9y ago
In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram made the bold conjecture that the whole universe might be a cellular automaton. So there doesn't necessarily have to be a designer: it could just be part of the fabric of the universe itself, just as he breathtakingly predicted! I mean, he wasn't really thinking of train stations when he wrote that, it's not exactly the validation he would have liked... but I think at this point he'll take what he can get :) - EDIT: downvotes but I thought this was funny :)
- amelius 9y ago
  Did Wolfram give any clue about how e.g. relativity may emerge from a cellular automaton?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I think he might have. It's been a long time since I read his book, but see here: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physics/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physi.... I also remember reading elsewhere that e.g. speed of light (as a finite information speed limit) limit emerges straight out of casual networks generalized to be continuous instead of discrete.
  - Jach 9y ago
    Which relativity? :) No idea about Wolfram but special relativity doesn't need very many assumptions; you can do it if all you assume are causal sets and a quantification scheme: https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4172 https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4172 And since Conway's GoL is Turing-complete, you could maybe construct something using the Strong Church–Turing thesis.

Will_Parker 9y ago

I've long been a fan of Wolfram's ideas. But I wish he could write a single thing without most of it being about: how great he is, and how he has supposedly made the most progress in history with a cognitive step from already explored cellular automata. It's not even that I'm that bothered by the arrogance, it's just repetitive and boring.

WaxProlix 9y ago
It's pretty ceaseless, too, down to the names he gives everything (his name).
flukus 9y ago
At least this was relatively to the point, whenever I've read something from him in the past it's more like a 72 page treatise on cellular automata followed by the two line grilled cheese sandwich review the title promised.
Radim 9y ago
Wolfram reminds me of Richard Feynman, in that sense. The first time I tried to read "Surely You're Joking" as a kid I had to put it down -- the incessant "ME! ME! ME!" dripping from every page was a little too much. I've since mellowed down and can read Feynman or Wolfram without any issues. I even enjoy that style now :-)
- deleted 9y ago
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- hyperpallium 9y ago
  4/3 I's per paragraph
  - deleted 9y ago
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- pocketsquare2 9y ago
  The first time I tried to read a Feynman Diagram as a kid I had to put it down -- the incessant "ME! ME! ME!" dripping from every subatomic particle was a little too much.

flavio81 9y ago

One of the most coolest posts i've seen lately. I did not know such patterns were also present in antique art. I guess one learns a cool thing every day !

LoSboccacc 9y ago
Well look into Ancient Greeks they were already relating beauty and math. Hard to say where it came out first but they started noticing patterns in music and from there to associating art to mathematical proportion was a short step

symmetricsaurus 9y ago

James Grime (of, perhaps, Numberphile fame) made a video about it [1]. He also talks about how it's supposed to be related to Conway's game of life but is actually not (Conway's game of life is a 2D cellular automaton, while rule 30 is 1D). [1]: https://youtu.be/aeyhnrZvQBE https://youtu.be/aeyhnrZvQBE

sova 9y ago
Rule 30 is 1D? Could you please elaborate on what you mean?
- LukeShu 9y ago
  The pictures you're looking at, one of the axes is time. One row "becomes" the row below it. Each time-step iteration adds a row to the bottom, while the rows above it are immutable (because they are in the past).
  - munificent 9y ago
    This leads to the natural follow-up question: You can take a 2D automaton like Conway's Game of Life and turn time into a third dimension, giving you a single static volume. Has anyone tried doing that and 3D printing it?
    - mcpherrinm 9y ago
      I found https://www.wired.com/2014/10/3-d-printed-shoes-generated-using-conways-game-life/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/3-d-printed-shoes-generated-us... which seems cool Perhaps easier than 3D printing would be stacked laser-cut acrylic sheets. You could use transparent and partially opaque colors for dead and live cells, which lets you see the interior 3D structures more clearly than purely opaque 3D printed structures. I think the optical quality would likely be a lot better than anything I've seen 3d printed. I'm interested enough in this idea to see if I can come up with some interesting figures to make.

alkonaut 9y ago

We get it - cellular automata. This would have been an interesting article if he had tracked the artist/architects, interviewed them and asked them how they ended up with these patterns, what tools they used etc. Instead it's the same endless blabber about the damn automata we have heard for the last 20 years.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Well they do make nice PRNGs.
jdironman 9y ago
Why do multiples of '512' using the Wolfram alpha automata panels show dark gray canvases? (For example, 512,1024,2048, etc...) https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/sw-blog/capanels https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/sw-blog/capanels

vbuwivbiu 9y ago

the implication being that this railway station will accelerate human evolution the way the monolith in 2001 did

mturmon 9y ago

You can make some pretty fun tilings out of Penrose tiles as well. My wife and I made a ceramic-tile headboard out of the Penrose P2 tiling (an aperiodic tiling) that looks quite lovely - the tiles, being handmade, avoid sterility. Like the patterns in the OP, they have recurring themes, but don't fully repeat.

rurban 9y ago
Penrose tilings would look much better, yes. They are proven to be aperiodic. Penrose' alma mater was St.John's in Cambridge but then he switched to be professor at Oxford, in the south. So they cannot really put Penrose tilings on a Cambridge station. There's huge rivalry between those two cities. But how could they fuck up Conway with Wolfram tilings? Wolfram went to St.John's in Oxford and then moved to California. No Cambridge there. Conway's alma mater was in Cambridge and then he became professor in Princeton, USA. Penrose has the same affiliations as Conway, the only problem is that Penrose stayed in the UK and went to Oxford.
- jamessb 9y ago
  There is a 'Penrose Paving' outside the new Mathematical Institue in Oxford (the Andrew Wiles building), which opened in 2013. There's a video of Roger Penrose talking about it [1], and a time-lapse of it being laid [2]. [1]: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/865 https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/865 [3]: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/our-building https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/our-building
NelsonMinar 9y ago
Has the patent expired? https://morris.cymru/2009/01/penroses-patent-and-the-battle-of-the-tissue-tiles-contains-mathematics/ https://morris.cymru/2009/01/penroses-patent-and-the-battle-...

sova 9y ago

Uncanny and amazing

kaundur 9y ago

If anyones interested I wrote some JS to view states 0 to 255 in canvas. http://www.kaundur.com/jekyll/update/2016/10/31/cellular-automaton.html http://www.kaundur.com/jekyll/update/2016/10/31/cellular-aut...

ncw33 9y ago

Brilliant spot! I hadn't read that in the local papers - there was simply criticism of the 'boxy' design. I live right by that station, and used it for the first time this weekend (only a few days after it opened) and my wife and I commented on the attractive appearance of it. Despite some controversies (are there enough ticket machines, enough toilets, enough train services, and so on...) Cambridge North is going to become a popular station.

graycat 9y ago

Very nice!

jsat 9y ago

Fantastic post. Opened me up to some mathematics I didn't know about. But please Wolf, these pictures are tiny.

mtgx 9y ago

A somewhat relevant "theory of everything" in a TED video from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy4t_zAJJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy4t_zAJJ4

GlennS 9y ago

Anyone know the origin of the 22,000 BC pattern? I had no idea anyone was making such impressively detailed masonry that far back. The Sumerian columns with geometric mosaics are pretty cool too.

fjfaase 9y ago

Maybe, the should have used one of the many repeating Rule 30 patterns: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Rule30.html http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Rule30.html

lanbanger 9y ago

Just a shame there are no direct trains to or from London to Cambridge North, eh?!

justincormack 9y ago
There are. Even some reasonably fast ones, the fast train I got from London to Cambridge was stopping there next stop just the other day.

DonHopkins 9y ago

The walls along 101 through a stretch of Menlo Park have error diffusion dither patterns on them that I enjoy. Or at least it looks like an error diffusion dither and not a cellular automata to me, because it seems like a gradient, somewhat random, sparse, spread out, and not deterministic enough to be a cellular automata rule. https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA,+USA/@37.5866956,-122.3351576,3a,60y,139.98h,73.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1seu87WgEP76Ga7rNOYuN6mQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa6b1117280ff:0xebbf998e5df289ab!8m2!3d37.4529598!4d-122.1817252 https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA,+USA/@37.586... Here's a few layers of cellular automata (anneal, life and brian) combined with some error diffusion dithered heat flow, for your enjoyment (try clicking and dragging and spinning the mouse wheel): http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/ http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/

pvg 9y ago
What exactly is going on in the second link?
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  The doc's in the comments! ;) https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L41 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
  - pvg 9y ago
    Sweet, thanks. Without digging up the book, am I reading this right that this isn't a memoized algorithm like Hashlife, it's just that Javascript got that stupidly fast?
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      JavaScript got unexpectedly inconceivably stupidly fast. That code is not at all optimized (except that it tries to use efficient algorithms), and is very data driven and dynamically parametrizable with dictionaries, yet somehow it still runs really fast! JavaScript optimization is the new moon shot. It can emulate the CAM6 hardware, which uses look-up tables pre-computed from FORTH (now JavaScript) functions, which don't need to be optimized because they're run once over all possible inputs to generate the table, instead of for every cell of every frame. The trade-offs of hardware and software have changed a lot, and it's more than fast enough, so I optimized for readability and flexibility. It can run CAM6-compatible (but limited) lookup table based rules (for von Neumann, Moore and Margolus neighborhoods), and also run arbitrarily complex and multi-layered rules in JavaScript, that compute the cell value directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_neighborhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cellular_automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cellular_automaton The rules can be parameterized by dictionaries (including stuff like like simple numeric parameters, or arrays of convolution kernels, or additional lookup tables) that you can tweak while it's running. (The CAM6 lookup table isn't related to hashlife -- it's simply indexed by concatenating all the bits of the neighborhood together to make a binary number indexing into the table of next states -- that's what the CAM6 hardware did directly at 60 frames a second, on a 256x256 matrix, of 8 bits per cell.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam-6 CAM-6 Forth source code: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt Rudy Rucker writes about his CAM-6 in the CelLab manual: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html Computer science is still so new that many of the people at the cutting edge have come from other fields. Though Toffoli holds degrees in physics and computer science, Bennett's Ph.D. is in physical chemistry. And twenty-nine year old Margolus is still a graduate student in physics, his dissertation delayed by the work of inventing, with Toffoli, the CAM-6 Cellular Automaton Machine. After watching the CAM in operation at Margolus's office, I am sure the thing will be a hit. Just as the Moog synthesizer changed the sound of music, cellular automata will change the look of video. I tell this to Toffoli and Margolus, and they look unconcerned. What they care most deeply about is science, about Edward Fredkin's vision of explaining the world in terms of cellular automata and information mechanics. Margolus talks about computer hackers, and how a successful program is called “a good hack.” As the unbelievably bizarre cellular automata images flash by on his screen, Margolus leans back in his chair and smiles slyly. And then he tells me his conception of the world we live in. “The universe is a good hack.” [...] Margolus and Toffoli's CAM-6 board was finally coming into production around then, and I got the Department to order one. The company making the boards was Systems Concepts of San Francisco; I think they cost $1500. We put our order in, and I started phoning Systems Concepts up and asking them when I was going to get my board. By then I'd gotten a copy of Margolus and Toffoli's book, Cellular Automata Machines, and I was itching to start playing with the board. And still it didn't come. Finally I told System Concepts that SJSU was going to have to cancel the purchase order. The next week they sent the board. By now it was August, 1987. The packaging of the board was kind of incredible. It came naked, all by itself, in a plastic bag in a small box of styrofoam peanuts. No cables, no software, no documentation. Just a three inch by twelve inch rectangle of plastic—actually two rectangles one on top of the other—completely covered with computer chips. There were two sockets at one end. I called Systems Concepts again, and they sent me a few pages of documentation. You were supposed to put a cable running your graphics card's output into the CAM-6 board, and then plug your monitor cable into the CAM-6's other socket. No, Systems Concepts didn't have any cables, they were waiting for a special kind of cable from Asia. So Steve Ware, one of the SJSU Math&CS Department techs, made me a cable. All I needed then was the software to drive the board, and as soon as I phoned Toffoli he sent me a copy. Starting to write programs for the CAM-6 took a little bit of time because the language it uses is Forth. This is an offbeat computer language that uses reverse Polish notation. Once you get used to it, Forth is very clean and nice, but it makes you worry about things you shouldn't really have to worry about. But, hey, if I needed to know Forth to see cellular automata, then by God I'd know Forth. I picked it up fast and spent the next four or five months hacking the CAM-6. The big turning point came in October, when I was invited to Hackers 3.0, the 1987 edition of the great annual Hackers' conference held at a camp near Saratoga, CA. I got invited thanks to James Blinn, a graphics wizard who also happens to be a fan of my science fiction books. As a relative novice to computing, I felt a little diffident showing up at Hackers, but everyone there was really nice. It was like, “Come on in! The more the merrier! We're having fun, yeeeeee-haw!” I brought my AT along with the CAM-6 in it, and did demos all night long. People were blown away by the images, though not too many of them sounded like they were ready to a) cough up $1500, b) beg Systems Concepts for delivery, and c) learn Forth in order to use a CAM-6 themselves. A bunch of the hackers made me take the board out of my computer and let them look at it. Not knowing too much about hardware, I'd imagined all along that the CAM-6 had some special processors on it. But the hackers informed me that all it really had was a few latches and a lot of fast RAM memory chips.

eternalban 9y ago

This guy really thinks he invented cellular automata.

laszlokorte 9y ago

the fashion online shop asos.com also uses a pattern that looks like a cellular automaton for it's packaging: https://twitter.com/laurenadams7/status/632178492503912448 https://twitter.com/laurenadams7/status/632178492503912448

peeters 9y ago

I'm pretty new to CA, so I found this really useful in giving some necessary background to the algorithm and what a "rule" is: http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-7-cellular-automata/ http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-7-cellular-automata/

posterboy 9y ago

That the author would focus purely on his PoV fits with what I read about the author's character. I was reading and wondering why he wouldn't inquire and link to an official statement.

api 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467718 and marked it off-topic.
Dylan16807 9y ago
> That the author would focus purely on his PoV fits with "this being a casual blog.", I believe is how that sentence is supposed to end.
- posterboy 9y ago
  a 1000 word article doesn't quite strike me as casual.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    The length seems pretty typical to me. Most of the text actually goes to explaining pictures.

dannyking 9y ago

I made a set of ten cellular automata posters for my office wall y'all might like! Let me know if you'd like me to send out some high res versions. https://imgur.com/a/cz7V2 https://imgur.com/a/cz7V2

jacquesm 9y ago
Those are beautiful.
- dannyking 9y ago
  Thanks! Made them using Processing.org then printed them in high resolution for the wall. Turned out really nicely!

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

How many human beings on the planet could have seen that pattern, realized it was familiar, and then figured out what it was? It's like an inside practical joke, or, the ultimate Easter Egg.

Retra 9y ago
Lots of people. That's why Wolfram kept getting requests to identify it. That's why the building was designed with that pattern. It's not like there's anything particularly obscure here.
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
  Hmm. This is a train station, yes? What % of people transiting the station see that pattern and think, 'Oh, that's a cellular automata.'. Clearly more than zero, and perhaps it's not considered obscure by HN readers, but likely a very, very small % of passengers will recognize what it is. Wolfram himself seemed to be surprised.
  - Retra 9y ago
    I guess I just got the sense from your post that it would take a 1-in-6-billion person to recognize the pattern rather than something more realistic like 1-in-ten-thousand.

temp246810 9y ago

This is the quintessential hacker news post, IMO. A topic that on the surface seems run of the mill (a train station) Technical in its essence Authored by someone notable (in this case really notable, which is not a requirement) My comment on the other hand, not in the spirit of the discussions on HN but I like to celebrate good posts when I see them.