5 ms·
So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line? That's kind
by pkilgore 11mo ago
So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line?
That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.
Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!
- layer8 11mo agoSee here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start=200#p222219 https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start... It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1 https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
- dkural 11mo agoOnly about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.
- levocardia 11mo agoGame of life indeed!
- 2snakes 11mo agoAlso share about 60 percent with bananas.
- H8crilA 11mo ago> Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1, 2025. Almost 10 years of development.
- tantalor 11mo agoHow many steps is the period? How far does it travel in that period? What direction does it go? Does it clean up after itself?
- layer8 11mo agoAs the wiki page states, the period is 133076755768, and it moves by two cells in that time. Spaceships in GoL by definition don’t leave anything behind, they produce the exact same configuration, just shifted across the grid. Given that it starts as a single line, it is symmetric in the axis implied by that line, and hence can’t possibly move diagonally or orthogonal to the line. Hence it moves in the direction of the line.
- tantalor 11mo agoThanks! I was a bit confused by that wiki page because it says "Direction Orthogonal" but like you said that can't be.
- layer8 11mo agoYeah, “orthogonal” here just means “not diagonal”. Since GoL configurations don’t have a distinguished orientation (you can rotate and/or mirror them however you like), it wouldn’t make sense to specify up/down/left/right, at least not without first fixing an (arbitrary) orientation.
- Retr0id 11mo agoI'm barely able to follow, but this part was fun: > The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.
- Romario77 11mo ago[flagged]
- tomtomtom777 11mo ago> I asked AI to explain it to me, We all know how to do that, but that's not why were here.
- alwa 11mo agoI’m not sure where our guidelines/norms are on this kind of thing, but I get the sense that most of us feel very capable of pasting articles into LLMs ourselves. What we’re less capable of—and the reason we look to each other here instead—is distinguishing where the LLM’s errors or misinterpretations lie. The gross mistakes are often easy enough to spot, but the subtle misstatements get masked by its overconfidence. Luckily for us, a lot of the same people actually doing the work on the stuff we care about tend to hang out around here. And often, they’re kind enough to duck in and share. Thank you in any case for being upfront about it. It’s just that it’d be a shame and a real loss if the slop noise came to drown out the signal here.
- minimaxir 11mo agodang (the head moderator of Hacker News) has said multiple times that HN prefers human-only comments.
- scotty79 11mo agoThank you for this description. I thought it's a glider for some 1 dimensional cellular automata system.
- kevincox 11mo agoYes, that was my first reading as well. I thought "((1D Conway's Life) glider) found" but it is "(1D (Conway's Life glider)) found".