6 ms·

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 wro

• 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
          • szemet 9y ago
            Ok but anyway, either they were ignorant or they simply lied in the press release. Choose freely what shows the project members in a better light! (Neither? ;) My initial quotation was this from the press release: The architects said the aluminium design is derived from John Conway's Game of Life 'cellular automaton', http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/could-cambridge-north-station-owe-13111740 http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/could-ca... You can't protect this with some kind of "we all come from gogol's overcoat", mentality. If it is true then they should have put a Gogol image there! ;)
            • damnyou 9y ago
              The architects probably don't have much control over the marketing. They're each doing their jobs.
          • TeMPOraL 9y ago
            Pragmatic choices one can forgive, but that doesn't make it right to pretend that a thing is something it isn't. Ultimately, it seems someone there is simply lying to people. And you may think it's trivial, but it's exactly how - step by step, creative decision by creative decision - we turn each other into idiots with little clue about how reality works. Something that was discussed at length just few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 See also: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect. I strongly second the quote that I once found on the Internet: "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires".
      • palunon 9y ago
        >Maybe they were going for the randomness that rule 30 provides (you can build a PRNG from it) but Game of Life doesn't? You can build a PRNG in Game of Life, since you can build a Turing Machine. http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm
        • reader5000 9y ago
          Isn't rule 30 also Turing complete? Therefore GoL and rule 30 can both emulate the other, modulo possible exponential blowups in time/space requirements.
          • doubleunplussed 9y ago
            Actually, according to the extended Church-Turing thesis, all Turing complete systems can emulate each other with at most polynomial overhead, so no exponential blow-ups. The only possible exception we know of is quantum computers.
          • teraflop 9y ago
            No, rule 30 isn't known to be Turing complete. You're probably thinking of rule 110.
      • Jach 9y ago
        > They're professionals like you. Give them some credit. Ha ha. There's professional courtesy, but at the same time there are annoying truths (like rampant ignorance perhaps only barely above the general population, depending on the profession) we don't like to discuss in an unspoken agreement. Honestly it just seems like a poorly communicated marketing blurb more than anything else. They wanted to say it's based on cellular automata because they're cool, and they can link the location to a guy somewhat famous even in the general population for something to do with automata (under the phrase GoL). An analogous situation might be some architecture using a Sierpinski pattern and having a blurb on how they derived it from fractals, and could relate the location to Mandelbrot.
      • DonHopkins 9y ago
        Life. Don't talk to me about life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA67a2-Klk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA67a2-Klk
    • samirillian 9y ago
      Not sure what post-modernism has to do with such a twisted artistic message, haha.
      • szemet 9y ago
        https://www.quora.com/Why-do-post-modern-artists-question-authorship-in-contemporary-art https://www.quora.com/Why-do-post-modern-artists-question-au...
        • samirillian 9y ago
          That's structuralism not postmodernism. Roland Barthes is a structuralist.
    • posterboy 9y ago
      I'd guess that GoL and Cellular Automaton Theory preceded and inspired rule 30 etc. So, maybe the architects implied metarecursion, that GoL metaphorically generated rule 30. GoL is Turing complete. I guess that means there is a starting condition that converges to a rule30 cellular automaton. edit: video of GoL emulated inside a turing machine in GoL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 (link replaced)
  • 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.