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Conways Game of Life on Blockchain
- flixic 6y agoI absolutely love this. One of the more poetic reasons why I like Ethereum VM is because it seems likely to keep running for a very, very long time. I would take a Long Bet that it will still exist 100 years in the future. With that in mind, this might end up being the longest "continuously running" (both words with some heavy qualifiers) Conway's Game of Life implementation.
- joosters 6y agoNever mind 100 years in the future, this game of life implementation isn't running even now. As the article says, it would cost $80 just to register the code to run it, never mind funding each compute step. And yet your phone could compute the next 100 years of this ethereum GoL calculations in far less than a second!
- flixic 6y agoI wouldn't bet on my phone's processor being functional in the XXIInd century, but this code will likely still be in EVM, ready to run. Sure, it's a very different beast, but I still find it really _cool_.
- joosters 6y agoBut that's my point, it is already NOT in the EVM, the cost is so high that the author didn't commit the code to it - ethereum fell at the very first hurdle!
- zadler 6y agoUnfortunately for naysayers, Ethereum or other blockchains will achieve cheap and long running dapps sooner or later.
- vages 6y ago“Naysayers”? Technologies do not prove themselves in a court of opinion. They prove themselves in the field. Critics are essential to any emerging technology; their criticism gives us a chance to fix its weaknesses. That being said, The Paris Agreement and I hope you’re right.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoNext year on the blockchain!
- bluescrn 6y agoPeople will still be able to play Super Mario Bros, even though the last NES will be long gone. Code of any real value will be preserved by enthusiasts, and be run via emulation or ported to modern systems. Meanwhile, most of todays blockchains will be dead. No nodes left to sync with. Maybe the blockchain concept will live on in a new form, but even now, there seem to be dying blockchains that are very difficult to connect to and use (e.g. Dogecoin, at least before the recent price surge) I guess a real threat to all historical code would be the end of open computing, and the requirement for any code run anywhere to be signed and censored by a megacorporation. Something we're getting worryingly close to. But in that world, most of today's blockchains will quickly die, too.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Taek 6y agoEthereum doesn't have a mechanism to run an operation periodically. If you want this game to step forward you need to make a new transaction and pay new fees.
- klingon78 6y agoCould undecidability similar to that of Conway or another halting problem be used to better solve security of financial transactions? If it’s ubersecure maybe it would outperform Moore’s Law, quantum computing, and the hyper-intelligent AIs.
- inspirehep 6y agoSuggestion- Could we implement soup search with the blockchain?(https://catagolue.hatsya.com/apgsearch https://catagolue.hatsya.com/apgsearch) The 'largest distributed search site of cellular automata', Catagolue, which discovers new patterns everyday, has enormous potential of pattern finding, trading and synchronous exhibiting. Could we embed soup search as a backend PoW
- eriktrautman 6y agoDeploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever. Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go! Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript https://docs.near.org/ https://docs.near.org/
- ivadim 6y agoNEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably the slowest too!)" :D NEAR is perfect to run a high performance simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/ http://berryclub.io/ where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the meanwhile
- i_love_limes 6y agoIf I could buy an NFT of the source code of this, would I have reached peak blockchain meta?
- slickrick216 6y agoOnly if you used chainlink to mint a new NFT per step. Then staked the NFTs on a different chain using a trust less bridge.
- Igelau 6y agoQuiet, they'll hear you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Adrock 6y agoNot peak, since someone will eventually buy the NFT for this HN comment.
- Kiro 6y agoMinting NFTs of NFTs is the next level.
- throwaway_kufu 6y agoI may have beat that, the day before Jack Dorsey blew up the service I bid on the tweet of the CryptoKitties Genesis NFT. So a NFT of a Tweet of an NFT.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoNot without first writing a spec for adding NFTs to bitcoin, I'm afraid.
- jeromeof 6y agoThe most expensive implementation of Conway's Game of Life ever - over $2,000 per step! (Probably the slowest too!)
- throwaway4good 6y agoThen try to calculate the energy / processing power spent per step.
- eoo 6y agoAssuming some market efficiency, those fees should be fairly similar to the cost to process that transaction into a block, so, 2,000 usd
- Taek 6y agoThe electricity isn't just paying for the one transaction it's paying to secure all historical transactions and all current balances. When counting how expensive a visa transaction is, you don't also consider the price of all the bank vaults in the world and the staff protecting those vaults, because protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new transactions.
- ggggtez 6y agoThere is a point to be made, but you've made it all wrong. You could argue that the $2000 transaction is actually validating all previous transactions... which sure. I will grant you that. But by that reasoning, you need to amortize all future purchases as paying for part of the Game of Life transaction! If you do that then the cost of the transaction approaches INFINITY DOLLARS as time goes to infinity! Obviously, this way of looking at the cost of the transaction is useless to the point of being meaningless. So let's stick with $2000, which has a clear meaning in reality.
- Bluestein 6y agoIs -this-, finally, the killer app? or, the way Skynet comes about?
- Ygg2 6y agoNo. And No.
- Bluestein 6y ago> No. And No. I thought as much ... (At least you've taken the time to reply - even to a tongue in cheek comment - instead of taking to the downvotes, which I appreciate ...) Considering EVM fees, I find it endlessly fascinating that people are paying for computation per cycle, on a distributed VM.- It blows one away ... (Also, a pity that Conway is not here to opine on this.)
- Bluestein 6y agoI strain under some miner's vengeful glee four points below smitten with a pick axe to the heart, my question's right though: is this the killer app?
- Bluestein 6y agoPrometheus' fire was deemed too vain a thing compared to blocked chained trees ... And yet, were lies the gain? Untold amounts of money changing hands amount to naught compared to all the promises of gold and a world changed, made by Satoshisan not long ago.
- Noxmiles 6y agoPlease, stop it. Some things just shouldn't be.
- kemonocode 6y agoIt's deployed in a test network. The carbon footprint of this little experiment is negligible: "This application would be able to run 'forever' - so long as there was some funds in an Ethereum account that could be used to run each 'step'. However, the cost of Ethereum (and therefore 'gas') used to run smart contracts is so high that it would cost (in March 2021) over $80 just to register the smart contract, and to run a single 'step' of the game would cost over $2,000! No doubt that the code could be made more efficient and consume less resources, but hey that's just too much work for a concept app, so I have simply registered the contract on the Kovan test network instead, and use some 'fake' Ethereum to run the system. The app is the same, but it just points to the 'Kovan' test network instead of the Ethereum mainnet."
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- tempodox 6y agoSo, is there proof of work for every single cell transition?
- TheRealPomax 6y agoIn the category "how can I contribute the most to the global climate change problem", we have a contender.
- a_hard_time 6y agoEvery HN thread relating to blockchain turns into either a) immediate dismissal of blockchain or b) immediate dismissal of blockchain based on its carbon footprint. Frankly, this is boring and repetitive. If you have no actual contribution to make, perhaps don't clutter every thread with the same critiques which have been discussed a thousand times before.
- fallingknife 6y agoYou could put it on a side chain. On matic gas is essentially free.
- NotJamie 6y agoWe need to go deeper. Game of life Mona Lisa on the block chain. Could end up rivaling the value of the actual Mona Lisa.
- jorl17 6y agoClearly the next step is to move NAO to the blockchain, so we can play nethack in the most immutable and verifiable way possible! (Congrats to OP. I find the project fascinating nonetheless :))