6 ms·

Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)

110 points by babelfish 2y ago

rossant 2y ago
(2012)
- dang 2y ago
  Added. Thanks!
quuxplusone 2y ago
The end of the post links to two jsfiddles: > If you want to try out SmoothLife yourself in your browser, I made a few jsFiddles which illustrate the basic principle. Here is a Fourier based implementation that follows the discussion in this article pretty closely: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/aj2vq/ http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/aj2vq/ > I also made a second WebGL/GPU based implementation that uses a discretization similar to that proposed in Rafler’s original paper: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/2jenR/ http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/2jenR/ The jsfiddles seem to still be alive, but the "Run" button doesn't work for me. Anyone have any luck with them?
- rezmason 2y ago
  Same. Looks like the "numeric" JS library is no longer hosted at the URL they link to in their dependency list— I had to replace it with "https://unpkg.com/numeric https://unpkg.com/numeric", which seems to have fixed it for me.
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    Where can you see this dependency list? Tried to look everywhere in the jsfiddle UI but don't find it My best attempt was setting numeric="https://unpkg.com/numeric https://unpkg.com/numeric" in the "Framework <script> attribute" dialog but that did nothing. EDIT: fixed it by copypasting the numeric.rep code from https://gist.github.com/ftrotter/5605853#file-numeric-1-2-4-js-L366 https://gist.github.com/ftrotter/5605853#file-numeric-1-2-4-... with 'var numeric = {}' in front of it near the top of the JS file
    - vollmond 2y ago
      > Where can you see this dependency list? Tried to look everywhere in the jsfiddle UI but don't find it "Resources" in the left side menu
cyanydeez 2y ago
What's important is there's a whole Conway wiki with an alien language that a LLM could learn to generate.
dang 2y ago
Discussed (just a bit) at the time: Conway’s Game of Life for Curved Surfaces - Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808071 - Nov 2012 (1 comment)
fallingknife 2y ago
That "smooth life" video was amazing! Really has an actual life feel to it.
lbeckman314 2y ago
That same paper was also cited by Lenia [0,1], another family of "continuous cellular automata"! [0] https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html [1] https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html
DiscourseFan 2y ago
Calculus plus Conway's Game of Life = infinitesimal approximation of actual life while never reaching its full complexity! But the artifice is cool, its similar in many ways to Gaudi's work, except that Gaudi probably understood, in some way, that what he was doing was artificial, which is what makes it both so fascinating and disturbing at the same time: it plays with, and then expands life. We view this as a subjugation of life to architecture--now, of course, computer architecture. What if the infinite overwhelmed the finite instead? Then we could have a power unparalleled in history. But it would not be an infinity from the perspective of the finite; symbolized, but not represented. We could say, beyond infinity, like Buzz Lightyear!
alvincodes 2y ago
Love it when more of the Internet discovers Mikola's work. This guy made so many nifty packages
Aardwolf 2y ago
Since this is (at least approximately) invariant under continuous shifts, continuous rotations, and time, should there be some kind of conservation of momentum and energy be visible? At least the amount of white/black shade in cells isn't conserved as far as I can tell (unless perhaps the white is spreading out while fading to black over huge distances... but the grid is wraparound here so probably not the case here)
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Assuming you're thinking about applying Noether's theorem, you need your system to have something like a Lagrangian (or be symplectic). From a quick glance it doesn't seem to me that you can write down an action S for the system so it's not clear that you could apply the theorem to get conserved quantities corresponding to the local symmetries of S.
lamsey 2y ago
https://art.muth.org/smoothlife.html# https://art.muth.org/smoothlife.html# webgl implementation of SmoothLife from the comments section of the YouTube video linked in this article
thijsai 2y ago
I did a Swift+Metal implementation of SmoothLife a while back: https://github.com/tscheepers/SmoothLife-Swift https://github.com/tscheepers/SmoothLife-Swift

110 points by babelfish 2y ago

rossant 2y ago

(2012)

dang 2y ago
Added. Thanks!

quuxplusone 2y ago

The end of the post links to two jsfiddles: > If you want to try out SmoothLife yourself in your browser, I made a few jsFiddles which illustrate the basic principle. Here is a Fourier based implementation that follows the discussion in this article pretty closely: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/aj2vq/ http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/aj2vq/ > I also made a second WebGL/GPU based implementation that uses a discretization similar to that proposed in Rafler’s original paper: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/2jenR/ http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/2jenR/ The jsfiddles seem to still be alive, but the "Run" button doesn't work for me. Anyone have any luck with them?

rezmason 2y ago
Same. Looks like the "numeric" JS library is no longer hosted at the URL they link to in their dependency list— I had to replace it with "https://unpkg.com/numeric https://unpkg.com/numeric", which seems to have fixed it for me.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  Where can you see this dependency list? Tried to look everywhere in the jsfiddle UI but don't find it My best attempt was setting numeric="https://unpkg.com/numeric https://unpkg.com/numeric" in the "Framework <script> attribute" dialog but that did nothing. EDIT: fixed it by copypasting the numeric.rep code from https://gist.github.com/ftrotter/5605853#file-numeric-1-2-4-js-L366 https://gist.github.com/ftrotter/5605853#file-numeric-1-2-4-... with 'var numeric = {}' in front of it near the top of the JS file
  - vollmond 2y ago
    > Where can you see this dependency list? Tried to look everywhere in the jsfiddle UI but don't find it "Resources" in the left side menu

cyanydeez 2y ago

What's important is there's a whole Conway wiki with an alien language that a LLM could learn to generate.

dang 2y ago

Discussed (just a bit) at the time: Conway’s Game of Life for Curved Surfaces - Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808071 - Nov 2012 (1 comment)

fallingknife 2y ago

That "smooth life" video was amazing! Really has an actual life feel to it.

lbeckman314 2y ago

That same paper was also cited by Lenia [0,1], another family of "continuous cellular automata"! [0] https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html [1] https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

DiscourseFan 2y ago

Calculus plus Conway's Game of Life = infinitesimal approximation of actual life while never reaching its full complexity! But the artifice is cool, its similar in many ways to Gaudi's work, except that Gaudi probably understood, in some way, that what he was doing was artificial, which is what makes it both so fascinating and disturbing at the same time: it plays with, and then expands life. We view this as a subjugation of life to architecture--now, of course, computer architecture. What if the infinite overwhelmed the finite instead? Then we could have a power unparalleled in history. But it would not be an infinity from the perspective of the finite; symbolized, but not represented. We could say, beyond infinity, like Buzz Lightyear!

alvincodes 2y ago

Love it when more of the Internet discovers Mikola's work. This guy made so many nifty packages

Aardwolf 2y ago

Since this is (at least approximately) invariant under continuous shifts, continuous rotations, and time, should there be some kind of conservation of momentum and energy be visible? At least the amount of white/black shade in cells isn't conserved as far as I can tell (unless perhaps the white is spreading out while fading to black over huge distances... but the grid is wraparound here so probably not the case here)

Y_Y 2y ago
Assuming you're thinking about applying Noether's theorem, you need your system to have something like a Lagrangian (or be symplectic). From a quick glance it doesn't seem to me that you can write down an action S for the system so it's not clear that you could apply the theorem to get conserved quantities corresponding to the local symmetries of S.

lamsey 2y ago

https://art.muth.org/smoothlife.html# https://art.muth.org/smoothlife.html# webgl implementation of SmoothLife from the comments section of the YouTube video linked in this article

thijsai 2y ago

I did a Swift+Metal implementation of SmoothLife a while back: https://github.com/tscheepers/SmoothLife-Swift https://github.com/tscheepers/SmoothLife-Swift