12 ms·

Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable

• zenmaster10665 3y ago
  Wow that is so cool. Fractal game of life! Is this just a very specific configuration that repeats in a fractal way?
  • monitron 3y ago
    Yes! The delightful reason why this configuration can repeat within itself is that this Game of Life pattern is a machine with the rules of Game of Life built into it. It's calculating and displaying the game step-by-step. If you watch the machinery you can see the "data" flying around between cells and then the cells turning on and off. This pattern isn't unique – you could certainly come up with infinitely many more machines in Game of Life that do the same thing. But yes, most Game of Life patterns aren't fractal like this.
• a-ungurianu 3y ago
  This is awesome and very mesmerising. Is the ability to do this tied to the fact that Game of Life is Turing-complete, or is there a weaker/stronger property that allows for this? Also, does this count as a “quine”?
  • dartos 3y ago
    You can think of it like that. I think that makes sense. You can build structures within the GoL rules that implement the GoL rules, so…
  • Filligree 3y ago
    People have built explicit turing machines in GoL, so it certainly is Turing-complete.
    • moritzwarhier 3y ago
      > Is the ability to do this tied to the fact that Game of Life is Turing-complete sounds like GP is aware of that fact :)
      • Filligree 3y ago
        I think that was edited in. Not sure at this point.
  • OscarCunningham 3y ago
    It needs to be able to compute, but also to be able to place cells in such a way as to 'display' the result one level up.
  • SamBam 3y ago
    I'd say it's certainly in the spirit of a quine. I feel like Hofstadter would love this if he isn't already aware of it.
  • samatman 3y ago
    It can't be a stronger property, the essence of Turing-completeness is that a Turing-complete automaton can simulate any other Turing-complete automaton, including itself. Whether an automaton, capable of scale-invariant self-simulation, but not exhibiting Turing-completeness, is even possible, is a very interesting question. I don't know the answer.
• inthemiddle 3y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978978
• nico 3y ago
  This is really cool, leaves me wondering about the fabric of the universe itself Could we be living in a infinitely recursive simulation?
  • a-r-t 3y ago
    If anyone is interested in reading about this idea, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" [0] and Max Tegmarks's "Our Mathematical Universe" [1]. [0] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ [1] https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html
    • hackinthebochs 3y ago
      Oh no what have you done
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • anthk 3y ago
      The Computational Beauty of Nature, too among: https://github.com/gwf/CBofN https://github.com/gwf/CBofN
  • kossTKR 3y ago
    Seems most likely, but why is there anything at all to begin with? .. a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach. Does anyone else sometimes get these "intuitive flashes of insight" - like your brain configures itself in a pattern that "lifts the veil". I've been thinking of starting meditating to stabilise or cultivate this state if possible because i've feel like i've been losing this slightly psychedelic ability since i was a kid. Most often i get it in the hypno/hypopompic phases, sudden flashes of eureka that disappears just as fast, like a loud echo of "wow this is existance", "time is unbelievably deep", "demensions and perspective are bizarre in essence", "is this just a fraction of a shared dream" etc.
    • mentos 3y ago
• screamingninja 3y ago
  Does not work for me in Firefox: `Uncaught TypeError: c[b[k]] is undefined`. Opens normally in the other major browser.
  • TomSwirly 3y ago
    Does work on FF, MacOS 14.3.1 (Sonoma :-/) (Some extensions conflict with some webpages, too...) One day we will get it together so every computer program works on every computer, if we don't collapse our ecosystem first.
  • tedivm 3y ago
    Weird, I viewed it on firefox with no issue. MacOS, latest version of firefox, mostly just privacy blocking extensions.
  • Cheer2171 3y ago
    Same, does not work for me on Android Firefox
  • kleiba 3y ago
    Does not work for me either, Firefox on Windows. But I'm getting a different error: this.frames.vb[k] is undefined
  • hetman 3y ago
    Weirdly it works fine for me in Firefox but just stays loading forever in Chrome.
  • nalinidash 3y ago
    I had to disable Enhanced Tracking Protection AKA ETP from firefox to run it.Otherwise it is stuck on loading screen. Though it is working with uBlock origin(default settings)..
    • rezmason 3y ago
      I've downloaded saharan's repo and poked around the Life Universe project in Chrome and FF— it seems that the pixels representing the compressed animation are retrieved through a Context2D::drawImage call, and are different in Firefox and other browsers. It makes sense that ETP would mess with the pixels output from a drawImage call, to fight fingerprinting. Maybe the ImageLoader can be replaced with a more direct PNG decoder stapled to a fetch(). If I can make that work tonight, I'll create a pull request; this is how I meet the coolest people.
• Jasmine209 3y ago
  [dead]
• nojs 3y ago
  This is amazing, more detail about how it works: http://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html?m=1 http://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html?m=1
  • waitforit 3y ago
    And by the author of this version: https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/ https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/
    • destring 3y ago
      That’s so clever. Nothing stands as particularly revolutionary but the author brilliantly solved all the problems to deliver the final product. They are only a undergraduate student as well, they have a bright future ahead.
      • Recursing 3y ago
        Why do you write that they're only an undergraduate student? They just finished their PhD https://twitter.com/shr_id/status/1770769090719731873 https://twitter.com/shr_id/status/1770769090719731873
        • FabHK 3y ago
          If you're curious why the document was issued in "year 6": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiwa_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiwa_era
          • Recursing 3y ago
            Thank you! I still don't understand the relationship between "year 6" and undergraduate, or where does it say "year 6". I'm honestly wondering as I don't know anything about Japan
            • 3y ago
• torcuato_ 3y ago
  [flagged]
• kzrdude 3y ago
  This is mind blowing; I'm lucky that I've seen hashlife and life in life before, that these additional layers by themselves don't leave me stunned for days.
• HackerLemon 3y ago
  Works on Edge but doesn't appear to be working on Firefox
  • dreen 3y ago
    works fine for me on ff/w10
• jader201 3y ago
  I’m assuming this is only achieved by “cheating” in some way? That is, I don’t see how giant pixels can come and go, at a zoomed in level, without breaking the rules of Conway’s game of life? Still cool, but more curious to understand how this works, and if it’s actually able to pull it off “legitimately”.
  • teraflop 3y ago
    Yes, this is legitimate, and there's no cheating. If you zoom in sufficiently, you can see that the "giant pixels" are really streams of spaceships, arranged in carefully positioned rows and columns that annihilate each other along the pixel's diagonal. These streams can be turned on or off to form the "display" component of each pixel, which is controlled by other parts of the pattern that do the actual computation. As you zoom in or out, the simulation speed changes. A pixel seems to undergo a discrete state change when zoomed out, but when you zoom in and slow down, you can see how that change is actually executed by many underlying computational steps. Other links in this thread go into more detail about how it works. The cleverest part is that the simulation is done in (more or less) "constant time" per frame, no matter how deeply you zoom or how fast you accelerate time.
    • TomSwirly 3y ago
      That is a good summary, but of course, there is "cheating" to do the infinite amounts of work required in a finite time! The board appears as if there exist at any time infinite levels of cellular automata going all the way down running things. In fact, they only compute one level deep and then short-circuit to using the "hardcoded" rules of Conway's life, and simply pop up the higher or lower levels on demand.
      • teraflop 3y ago
        That's a fair point, but I don't consider that "cheating" any more than Hashlife [1] (which it's based on) is cheating. It's an ingenious trick that guarantees that what's displayed is exactly the same pattern as if all of the infinitely-many higher and lower levels had been simulated, in finite time. The rules of the cellular automaton are never broken, only elided. In a metaphorical way, it reminds me of the "tying the knot" trick in pure functional languages like Haskell, to turn an infinite computation into a finite data structure. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
• mvcalder 3y ago
  For the experts in the house: would it be possible for this to wrap around, so the highest and lowest level join? A torus of GoLs? Can such a thing, assuming it exists, have a finite number of layers? Just curious, this is amazing.
  • dbdudbdiddjc 3y ago
    What does that mean
    • rpastuszak 3y ago
      I guess what they mean is that the "zoom" would be cyclic, e.g. at the same time the game zoomed at 1x would look like the game zoomed at 101x, zoomed at 2x would look like 102x etc... Totally different thing, but this makes me think of looping procedural animations, which are achieved by sampling noise on a circle (or walls of a cylinder in a 3d noise space).
  • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    At a very high level, this is simulating the Game of life at the appropriate resolution level based on an algorithm whose input parameters are the zoom level and your location in the space, similar to a fractal pattern. So I'm not sure what you mean by a "torus" of GoLs.
    • adrianmonk 3y ago
      Have you heard of the thought experiment where a 2D plane is finitely sized instead of infinitely sized, but as you travel within the 2D plane, if you get to one edge, you wrap around to the opposite edge? Even though its size is finite, you can pick a direction and go that way forever. If you sit in 3D space and look at this finite 2D plane, then it looks like (say) a rectangle. That's displeasing because from inside the plane, it's continuous, but from the outside, it looks discontinuous. One way to get rid of that annoyance is to map the plane onto a torus. Then it looks continuous from the outside. It's no longer flat, which is un-plane-like, but you can't have everything in life. Anyway, the zoom level of game of life is an infinite number line. But what if it repeats and can be represented as something that wraps around? You could think of it as a line segment that you wrap around into a circle (to join the two ends). So the same concept as mapping the plane onto a torus, except 1D instead of 2D.
• grugagag 3y ago
  Im mindblown and deeply thinking about existence now. Will probably end up with a headache if I continue so
• indrex 3y ago
  This proves it won’t take much to simulate reality.
  • p0w3n3d 3y ago
    Indeed. Life and universe and everything is 42
• xyst 3y ago
  Watching some squares advance in this universe reminds me of the corporate grind.
• aidos 3y ago
  That is an absolutely beautiful bit of work.
• dvh 3y ago
  ERROR> https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js(37) https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js(37): Uncaught Error: assertion error
• nbittich 3y ago
  unfortunately it doesn't load: Uncaught TypeError: c[b[k]] is undefined add https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:49 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:49 yg https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:37 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:37 kf https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 onload https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:223 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:223 Ug https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:223 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:223 kf https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 R https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:59 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:59 R https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:60 Cb https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:33 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:33 Vg https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:73 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:73 <anonymous> https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:242 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:242 <anonymous> https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:242 https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:242
  • doug_durham 3y ago
    Works on Safari for me.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • linkergames 3y ago
    I get the same error on Firefox 124.0. It works on Chrome 121 to 123.
  • y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
    I'm getting the same error in Firefox
• state_less 3y ago
  This reminds me of nested dreams, where you wake up from a dream in your bed, only to slowly realize you’re still dreaming and wake again in the same bed.
  • rolisz 3y ago
    Heh, I think my record is three level deeps (dream inside of a dream inside of a dream). Inception ftw.
    • waltbosz 3y ago
      Sometimes I have them at seemingly infinite levels of depth. Also the time dilation feels enormous. It feels like I've been dreaming for days.
      • jessekv 3y ago
        Can you elaborate more about the time dilation? I've had dreams about waking up in succession, but have not experienced a time dilation. Do you dream you are falling asleep, having an inner dream, and waking up again to the outer dream, to discover less time has passed than expected?
        • waltbosz 3y ago
          It just feels like the span of time of the dream is longer than I have been sleeping. I could sleep for an hour and dream for a day. But it's not really that I go through a day long dream, it's just that it feels like a day has passed. My theory is that the memory of a dream is actually formed instantaneously in the brain, not over whatever span of time you feel like has passed in the dream. Have you ever dreamed that you've spent an hour trying to turn off your alarm clock, but in real life you wake up and it's 1-minute past the alarm time? How can you have had this long complicated dream involving an alarm clock that won't turn off, but you've only really slept 1-minute through the alarm? My answer is, as I said, the dreams happen instantly but your brain just thinks time is passing in them because it's a false memory.
• CHMODX 3y ago
  I love this. Does this use a technique similar to what Noita devs did, and I guess most game devs, to only process visible areas?
• vbezhenar 3y ago
  Incredible. Looks like DNA. For some reason I want the ability to put a pixel and watch how it destroys the world :)
  • mickdarling 3y ago
    Adding one pixel at any level is the equivalent of adding me or infinite numbers of pixels, smaller and smaller levels. However, I think if you add in the pixel in a empty space at its level, it would simply disappear. I don't think it would cause any havoc. But, this is not an actual game of life. This is a PNG of many steps in a game of life. The computation power for actually making it a real game of life would be pretty big.
• monitron 3y ago
  I think the coolest thing about this is the way time works. One step at each level is computed using a large number of steps at the level below. So as you zoom out you are sinking into an exponential vortex where each step takes days, years, millennia to change. But ingeniously, the simulator smoothly scales its speed as you zoom, totally erasing the fact of time. I wish there was an indicator somewhere of how much game time was going by per real-life second. EDIT: ...but in order to do that you'd have to declare one of the levels to be the "bottom" level, the one that runs in real time, and that would ruin the fractalness of it all...
  • px43 3y ago
    For some reason what really sticks out to me is how when you zoom out, you always come out of a different part of the circuit, so it doesn't feel like the normal repetitive fractal, you're seeing all the parts of the machine from different chronological angles or something.
    • Mogzol 3y ago
      Interestingly, the author's blog post [1] mentions that this is due to technical limitations and not specifically done by choice, although I do like the effect. > When we zoom in, we discard the information of the largest meta-metapixel, so it is not always possible to reconstruct the same scene when we zoom out again. > Since zooming in and out can be continued indefinitely, we also realize that we need infinite information to accurately represent "our current position". [1] https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/ https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/
    • DonHopkins 3y ago
      Todepond's "Screens in Screens" explores infinite zoomability! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4OIcwt8vcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4OIcwt8vcE "Another thing I know about screens is, you can go into them as far as you want forever. And you can come out of them too, but you might not end up in the same place that you started. You might get lost. Or you might not."
  • dontreact 3y ago
• gregorymichael 3y ago
  My subconscious reaction when first zooming in was: “f—— you.” They’ve taken something I’ve been familiar with for 20+ years and completely blown my mind. One of the coolest things I’ve seen on here in a long time.
• archibaldJ 3y ago
  i think the freedom of zooming in and out is what deeper level of meditation feels like computationally, what appears as the experience of “consciousness” is thus Anattā (not-self) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā
• gdubs 3y ago
  This is beautifully executed. Game of Life must be the first simulation I ever took on as a programmer — and have revisited it over the years. To this day it continues to come up in my mind when people muse about things like consciousness. Is there a magic dust to us? Or are we the result of simple rules playing out in a grand stage?
  • anvandare 3y ago
    As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull, there is no sovereignty of the Self. But no one minds a thought thinking itself its own thinker, as there is no one at all. Just a thought.
    • cscurmudgeon 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness > As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull There doesn't need to be a magic dust for consciousness, it could still be a primitive compatible with existing physics. See what Roger Penrose worked on.
      • Nevermark 3y ago
        Or not a primitive but just emergent phenomena. I.e. an intelligent computing engine which learns to model both its environment and itself, with some degree of access and control of its internal processes including when it considers itself. At the point of clear, continuous practical self-awareness, how could it not be “conscious”? It will experience it’s self’s awareness of it’s self-awareness.
      • mistermann 3y ago
        Cognitive services are disabled (or have bugs injected) when consciousness is pointed at itself.
  • voiceblue 3y ago
    You might enjoy watching the emergent behavior in the execution of this 256 byte program - a mind is born [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8
• MrYellowP 3y ago
  This gave me a feeling of infinite computing power.
• gbolcer 3y ago
  Okay, this is amazingly cool.
• whartung 3y ago
  So, do you think this was a twinkle in the back of Conways mind when he was scheming and coming up with the game?
  • samatman 3y ago
    Probably not! I draw your attention to a paragraph from Gardner's column which introduced the Game of Life: > Conway conjectures that no pattern can grow without limit. Put another way, any configuration with a finite number of counters cannot grow beyond a finite upper limit to the number of counters on the field. This is probably the deepest and most difficult question posed by the game. Conway has offered a prize of $50 to the first person who can prove or disprove the conjecture before the end of the year. One way to disprove it would be to discover patterns that keep adding counters to the field: a "gun" (a configuration that repeatedly shoots out moving objects such as the "glider," to be explained below) or a "puffer train" (a configuration that moves but leaves behind a trail of "smoke"). I shall forward all proofs to Conway, who will act as the final arbiter of the contest. https://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/october1970.html https://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/october1970.html A related question is whether, after Bill Gosper won that conjecture a month later with the Gosper Glider Gun, did Conway then suspect that Life could be simulated in Life. I haven't been able to dig up a definitive answer but I suspect it's "yes".
• asow92 3y ago
  Reminds me of the animations in The Animatrix
• PhilipRoman 3y ago
  Interesting to see it's written in Haxe, a language I've never heard before. I've been looking for a "hacker's language" which could fit in practically any niche and this might just be it. With optional static typing, compilation to multiple targets (notably C++) I really don't understand why it's not more popular. Seems like a really pragmatic language whose designers understood the needs of developers.
  • zengid 3y ago
    I believe Haxe was made to replace flash. Not sure why it isn't more popular, but it has a lot of folks from the game community that use it.
    • OmarShehata 3y ago
      I was a big believer in Haxe, it seemed perfect. The main issue I and many people had at its inception was that the ecosystem was very fragmented. The promise was "write once, run everywhere" (which is what we had with Flash), but each platform you wanted to actually compile on was a whole process, often undocumented, with lots of caveats, and having to hunt for third party community wrappers to do the native integrations you want etc. This was ~10 years ago, I'm sure the current state of the ecosystem is very different (no idea), but this is the reason why I was never able to adopt it, and I heard the same thing from dozens of Flash creators at the time.
    • Dwedit 3y ago
      Dead Cells was made in Haxe.
  • tombert 3y ago
    Haxe is pretty neat, and worth playing with if you haven't. I don't do games so I haven't done much, but it kind of feels like "What if ActionScript 3 was allowed to break out of the Flash world, and keep evolving?". At some point I should really do more with it and make a game or something.
  • LeftHandPath 3y ago
    It looks neat. Reminds me of a lot of ideas I had of making a way to tightly couple classes/logic between PHP (server side) and JS (client side) when making websites and web apps. It came up a lot when making HTML-based forms. I’d define them all in PHP, but the experience is best without a page load, so typically I define some typescript object to send the form via Ajax. I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance), so instead typescript uses AJAX to ask the server for the list of inputs it needs to grab and send. It sounds like Haxe could be a much nicer way to do stuff like that: https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/
• waltbosz 3y ago
  I wonder how this app is perceived by people who under stand the rules of Game of Life, verses people who don't understand the rules. I showed it to my kids and they were amazed and mesmerized, but I know they can't grasp the complicated cellular automata that is happening.
  • posix86 3y ago
    It's not complicated though
    • catlifeonmars 3y ago
      That’s the beauty of cellular automata. Simple interactions can give rise to complex effects.
    • waltbosz 3y ago
      The rules of the game are simple enough to explain, when I said complicated I meant the interactions of the system as a whole. I mean, I don't really understand how a glider gun works.
      • samatman 3y ago
        Glider guns have a period of 30, so you could work them out on one tablet of graph paper if you wanted. Or just let a computer do it frame by frame and pay attention. This isn't a rebuke at all btw, it's a suggestion, this is a fun and edifying way to spend some time. Don't know if your kids are old enough for it yet, or have the interest to play along, but you might enjoy it.
• andoando 3y ago
  Few thoughts: 1. What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensue chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this. 2. Would it be possible to have each cell be a different stimulation while still acting as Conways Game of Life in a greater zoom. I imagine yes, so long as the simulation respects its boundaries and turns on and off at the correct times. I wonder what limits there are to this.
  • jamiek88 3y ago
    > What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensure chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this. Is this analogous to cancer? Would be interesting to see it develop and even if any ‘correction’ or ‘immune system’ type effects happens.
    • andoando 3y ago
      I suppose in a sense it would. Would be really interesting to explore that with different input values and see what happens. I imagine some changes would result in the whole thing eventually collapsing and others would maybe get self corrected. My guess is a any single change would collapse it either entirely or at least break the simulation of the game of life, while two changes might self correct each other. I also wonder what happens if we make changes not just to the initial configuration but at different iterations. After iteration 2, change x. It'd be like interweaving functions. Hmm really getting curious about trying this out myself.
    • Nevermark 3y ago
      I don’t think a change with effects rippling out would be a cancer. Cancer self-replicates whereas this would simply be either fast catastrophic failure for all levels above, or a change whose effect got suppressed (either died out, or maintained but doesn’t change next level behavior) and only had limited temporary impact.
      • andoando 3y ago
• jamiek88 3y ago
  Folks, this is one where you really have to try it not just read the comments (as I usually just do). I nearly clicked away but went in and was fricken mesmerized by this. It’s incredible.
  • hesdeadjim 3y ago
    Absolutely incredible.
  • canjobear 3y ago
    Indeed. Just looking at and zooming around is incredibly thought-provoking.
  • J_cst 3y ago
    I mainly read comments too... :)
  • Sn0wCoder 3y ago
    Agree with you about needing to click the site and about reading comments. I always read the comments first to see if the link is worth the click (paywall, waste of time, huge banners, scam site, etc.) Big shout out to those folks who are reading the articles and leaving comments for the rest of us. I am guilty of not commenting much on this platform mostly because even with all my experience rarely will my comment add to the discussion. I have made the game of life at least a dozen times in every new language I learn and am already thinking about how this is done. Even having a few example patterns the user can start with is sometimes a hassle depending on the implementation. This site has almost still life’s, oscillators and spaceships combined into an infinite number of layers (not sure it has all did not verify). The pattern does appear to be repeated but just getting the base layers is very impressive.
  • TheSkyHasEyes 3y ago
    Site hugged to death. :/ Will try in a few days.
    • hacky_engineer 3y ago
• drewfis 3y ago
  Makes me wonder if there's even smaller building blocks of the universe. Smaller than Photons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Electrons, Quarks and we just can't 'zoom in' enough to know about them.
  • jordanpg 3y ago
    [Stephen Wolfram sits up.]
  • catlifeonmars 3y ago
    Does it matter, if they have no discernible difference or effect than our current “simpler” models?
    • OscarCunningham 3y ago
      If our 'fundamental' physics is actually emergent from a lower layer then we might expect that our laws are actually leaky abstractions. Very occasionally things at the lower level will happen in an unusual way that causes the laws of physics to be broken at our level.
      • andoando 3y ago
        That is in fact what quantum physics showed.
• catlifeonmars 3y ago
  Does this count as a quine?
• Jasmine209 3y ago
  [dead]
• canjobear 3y ago
  Is this the simplest construction of a self-simulating game of life?
  • OscarCunningham 3y ago
    No. The centre of each meta-cell is full or empty to display the state of the cell. You could remove all that and it would still be simulating the Game of Life, it would just be hard to tell what was happening without zooming in.
• brrrrrm 3y ago
  Stuff like this always makes me think: what super structure do our brains form? Always end up concluding it’s the economy
• mattxxx 3y ago
  very beautiful application of games of life as computational tools, simulations of simulations of simulations. you're hired
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  This simulates my layman’s understanding of the holographic principle.
• for_i_in_range 3y ago
  Whelp, there goes my afternoon.
• ordu 3y ago
  Is it possible to build a macro simulation of the world of quantum mechanics? And then macro-macro... BTW I think it is not possible but what is the difference between GoL and QM that makes QM so narrowly bound to a nanoscale.
  • ziofill 3y ago
    Physicist here: yes, it is theoretically possible, but practically impossible because the complexity of a classical simulation of a quantum system scales exponentially in the physical size of the system. It would be practically possible if the problem has useful symmetries, like only allowing 2-dimensional Hilbert spaces (qubits), and a set of possible transformations (e.g. Clifford+T gates) as we do in quantum computing. In fact one of the things we actually do that resembles what you are describing is quantum error correction, where codes are concatenated until the rate of logical errors becomes low enough.
• davelondon 3y ago
  Oh my lord this is amazing.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• scotty79 3y ago
  For me this is an illustration that the simulation hypothesis is silly. Lower level of simulation doesn't need to have any api-s or system calls. There is no way to hack anything about underlying simulation nor learn anything about it or even about it's existance.
• darreninthenet 3y ago
  Think my brain just exploded
• anoncow 3y ago
  That entire website is something.
• cochleari_major 3y ago
  I find the following asymmetry interesting: if you pick a random spot and start zooming out, you will pass through interiors of both dead and living cells in some ratio. But if you start zooming in, pretty much all of the cells you pass through will be dead.
  • andoando 3y ago
    Yeah I found the same thing, does anyone have an explanation for that?
  • SamBam 3y ago
    Except that even in dead space when you zoom in you find the borders of all cells, and each of those borders is just as alive as any other live cell. I kept feel like, if I zoomed in to either an always-on cell or an always-off cell I would enter into something noticeably more static, but actually each one was just as alive as any of the universe around it.
  • tschumacher 3y ago
    Yes, this is inconsistent. When you zoom in 10 levels and then zoom out 10 levels again, pretty much all cells you see will be dead. But if you continue to zoom out further than 10 levels, you will see some mix of live and dead cells again. Zooming in is easily defined: when you zoom into an on-state OTCA metapixel, you can check which pixels that make up the metapixel are on and which are off [1]. Same deal for zooming into an off-state OTCA metapixel. The reason you are seeing mostly dead pixels is that most pixels inside an OTCA metapixel are off, so the chance of hitting a pixel that is on is slim. Zooming out is more tricky: when zooming out of an on-state pixel, that pixel could be at many possible positions inside an on-state or off-state OTCA metapixel. In their blog post the author says that they randomly select from the possible options in a way that adds "diversity" [2]. I think this could be improved to align with the statistics of zooming in. [1]: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel [2]: https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/#fnref5 https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/#fnref5
• Snoupy 3y ago
  Out of all the ways to replicate a game of life inside a game of life, there has to exist a "most efficient" one for a given size and speed. Something maybe akin to Carnot efficiency. I wonder if aspects of the maximum ratio of scale for space and speed apply to all "simulation inside simulation". And does it say something about our reality? Maybe Planck length is the smallest unit of length and lightspeed is the maximum speed irl and that tells us about what we can simulate and could be simulated from lol
• blendergeek 3y ago
  Flick the scroll wheel a few times and it will zoom out continuously. Amazing! I want this (continuously zooming out) as a screensaver 20+ years ago (or today, I can probably figure out how to enable screensavers on a modern Linux system). It would be amazing.
• reactordev 3y ago
  I moved the time multiplier slider to 0.2x and scrolled quickly out. When I did I got stuck in this slow outward zoom that allowed time to tick and it presented the most beautiful infinitum simulation of life I've ever seen. My gosh this is cool. It just goes on and on and on forever!!!
• andrewfromx 3y ago
  the designer version: https://www.tiktok.com/@alirezashahbazi.art/video/7122391438750469381 https://www.tiktok.com/@alirezashahbazi.art/video/7122391438...
• chrsw 3y ago
  Fascinating
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• GalaxyNova 3y ago
  Wow! This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.
• cdchn 3y ago
  I mean this in the best way possible, this is the best mind-trip I've seen in weeks.
  • cryptoegorophy 3y ago
    There is a video by veritasium that concludes with this animation. It gives you goosebumps.
• wigster 3y ago
  coincidentally bumped into this time axis GoL animation today: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW
• imranq 3y ago
  Dang this is super cool - here is the github link for anyone to see how it works: https://github.com/saharan/works/tree/main/life https://github.com/saharan/works/tree/main/life
  • whitehexagon 3y ago
    A few other nice simulations on that repo, but this is by far the best, and most amazing Life idea I have seen for a long while.
• flockonus 3y ago
  I was trying to figure out how they coded the game in the game, and it seems all code is "running" from the grid's lines.. Let alone they coded it, how do you go about debugging and unit testing such code?
• dohello1 3y ago
  thats really interesting, so cool how people seem to always add interesting features to the game of life
• jimmySixDOF 3y ago
  There is a cool 3D visualization of the game where each previous timeframe is layered sequentially below like roots growing and animated from an isometric perspective. It looks super cool --- nothing fractal like this, but definitely a shared art meets science vibe. AlecsForum : https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW/
• jzer0cool 3y ago
  Very beautiful. Could someone share a simple intuition how the infinite zoom works for computation? I'd imagine it is computing for only those pixels rendered on the screen, but cannot fully wrap what is happening (especially the smoothness here of the zooming in and out).
• paulmd 3y ago
  Please implement the ability to link to a particular viewport (insensitive to exact viewing hardware)
• Chrupiter 3y ago
  Just a heads-up, I think it needs WebGL. By default I turn it off on Firefox because I have a weird bug where sometimes Google Maps turns black. On Vivaldi it ran fine.
• Linda231 3y ago
  [dead]
• grishka 3y ago
  Impressively cool! Would also make a nice screensaver.
• ofirrabanian 3y ago
  This is 100% one of the coolest things I've seen for a while.. It's amazing to see the structures that happens as you zoom out over and over again.
• shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
  > Uncaught TypeError: c[b[k]] is undefined Firefox
• brap 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder if our own universe is kinda like that. We keep looking for the most basic particles, but maybe there are none. Maybe it’s all just infinitely zoomable and we’re only aware of our own level. Stuff is made of stuff which is made of other stuff, infinitely. And maybe there’s life in different levels. Like, inside the electron. Or maybe we’re all living inside of much larger life forms.
  • mikestaub 3y ago
    Relevant video: https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU?t=441 https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU?t=441
• banku_brougham 3y ago
  Is it necessary for the grid lines to be composed of the little moving things? At the next level up only the filled-in pixels are visible.
  • banku_brougham 3y ago
    Found the answer. The OTCA metapixel is the invention from 2006 that allows Life pixels to be represented by nested Life structures. So the answer is yes the whole structure depends on those border regions (which overlap neighbiring metapixel by one pixel.
• alexanderfrieda 3y ago
  [dead]
• redder23 3y ago
  With Brave Shields turned on, this never loads ... "https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-K6BVDSF3MT https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-K6BVDSF3MT" is blocked and that causes the site to fail? If so, this is bad design.
• rasulkireev 3y ago
  This is so awesome :heart_eyes:!!