10 ms·
Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers
- dexter313 14y agoAwesome, but the results/behaviour (in the video) don't seem very complex like the original Conway's game of life.
- canistr 14y agoIt does seem more "organic", if you will.
- reginaldo 14y agoLifelike might be the term you're looking for... :)
- dexter313 14y agoIt does. Still I think the point of game of life is not to look organic but to make complex thing from very simple rules. Like supposedly the universe we live in. Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, no computer can do that of course.
- evoxed 14y ago> no computer can do that of course Just check the frontpage again in a few years.
- tisme 14y agocheck out hashlife and some of the larger landscapes.
- dgreensp 14y agoThank you, mind blown! Downloaded "Golly" (http://golly.sourceforge.net/ http://golly.sourceforge.net/) and ran HashLife/metapixel. Life simulating life, and it runs in real time.
- tisme 14y agoMind blown pretty much describes what I felt like when I first came upon it. After spending a good bit of time optimizing 'life' having your ass handed to you by a large number of orders of magnitude courtesy of mr. Norvig is a good lesson in humility.
- tripzilch 14y agohashlife is a pretty brilliant algorithm. basically it sort of memoizes patterns at different scales. highly recommended to check out the details of how it works.
- ktizo 14y agono computer can do that of course. we are getting there - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
- scrumper 14y agoOutstanding, thank you for this. Worth a post on its own don't you think?
- saraid216 14y agoThat's the video in the same blog if you click "Previous": http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/05/turtles-all-the-way-down-or-gliders-or-glider-turtles/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/05/turtles-all-the-way-down-or-...
- DanBC 14y agoIt had one, 4 months ago. No comments, only 4 points. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4014078 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4014078) I think I've seen it before that too, from HN.
- eru 14y agoAnd you can run that in real time on a desktop. The secret is a hash life approach.
- psc 14y agoWell, generations don't have to be rendered in realtime, so you could just grab some high cpu instances on AWS and compute really large sizes. For example, this guy made a turing machine, and it's pretty huge: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm And that was in 2000. I'm sure we could do extremely large boards now.
- DanBC 14y ago> Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, no computer can do that of course. How far do you want to zoom out?
- cpeterso 14y agoAll the way.
- dmorgan 14y ago>It does. Still I think the point of game of life is not to look organic but to make complex thing from very simple rules. Em, it's called "Game of Life" because the whole point was for it to look and behave _organic (Wikipedia: "Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself").
- rm999 14y ago> Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, Are you sure? This isn't obvious to me.
- hnriot 14y ago"Make complex things from simple rules" - that's pretty much defining organic in this sense.
- dllthomas 14y agoRight - can you still build a UTM in this?
- finnw 14y agoIf you could, I imagine that the hard part would be proving it correct.
- brilee 14y agoIt seems to have much simpler behavior - gliders, bridges, and bricks. Don't think we're going to discover any prime number generators with this version of Life.
- dmorgan 14y agoHuh? It looks even more complex --organic even. You don't confuse the fast rate of change in some Conway implementations (which is a detail) with actual complexity.
- jonny_eh 14y agoI need this as a screensaver, asap!
- mmariani 14y agoIf you're on a Mac I guess you could hack it rather quickly in Quartz Composer using this as a starting point. http://quartzcomposer.com/compositions/135-conway-s-game-of-life http://quartzcomposer.com/compositions/135-conway-s-game-of-...
- mrshoe 14y agoConsidering this is the XScreenSaver creator's blog, you might just get your wish.
- uvdiv 14y agoHTML5 implementation in 3, 2...
- nuttendorfer 14y agoSurely you mean "pure CSS3 implementation".
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ante_annum 14y agosurely, someone has implemented a css3 rendering engine in redstone by now?
- daenz 14y agoIf not, they need to stop wasting time and get around to it.
- ktizo 14y agoHow about doing an implementation of smoothlife in conway's life? Might run a bit slow.
- tomjen3 14y agoWell I can't seem to find the rules, but that shouldn't be very difficult. Might even be able to do it in a way that works without canvas.
- 33a 14y ago1: http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/ http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/
- tisme 14y agoFascinating, totally mesmerizing video. That's reminiscent of something that you could be observing under a microscope.
- Anchor 14y agoI wonder what a 3D version (http://www.ibiblio.org/e-notes/Life/Game.htm http://www.ibiblio.org/e-notes/Life/Game.htm) of a continuous game of life would look like... could similar cell-like structures emerge with these kind of rules also in 3D.
- mbrubeck 14y agoSmoothLife has been generalized to 3D too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsEyu8Ol-Q&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsEyu8Ol-Q&NR=1
- jmpeax 14y agoIs it Turing complete?
- shmageggy 14y agoI'd bet it is, but I imagine it would be really hard to prove. The original turing-completeness proof [1] for discreet cellular automata worked by setting up some predictable repeating patterns and then using these to encode a representation of some other simple machine that was known to be turing-complete. Getting anything repeatable out of this would obviously be much harder, as any slight perturbation would cause unpredictable effects (see: chaos theory). However, I haven't read the paper so maybe they have some way of setting up the system that enables repeatability. 1. http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-1-1.pdf http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-1-1.pdf
- jrl 14y agoIt looks like cells under the microscope. Very interesting stuff.
- teamls 14y agoHey guys, check out the Conway's Game of Life Code Garage project on LearnStreet: http://www.learnstreet.com/cg/simple/project/conways http://www.learnstreet.com/cg/simple/project/conways
- waqf 14y agoI'm not logging in with Facebook to see your site, about which I know nothing, when you haven't even sold me on its relevance to the topic under discussion.
- pests 14y agoDid you, um, click the links at the top?
- waqf 14y agoI was following a URL that apparently was supposed to go to a specific subpage, not to the site homepage. And apparently there was a loginwall in front of that subpage. What good would clicking around the site have done? If you think I was going to read all the pages I could access on the site, so that I could ascertain whether it was worth my while to log in, then you grossly overestimate my commitment to a poorly-explained link I clicked speculatively in a comment.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pav3l 14y agoAren't cellular automata in continuous space just PDE's? If so, what is the equation being integrated? EDIT: found the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.1567v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.1567v2.pdf
- brilee 14y agoNot quite; the values at every point are boolean, not floats. (From the link) The algorithm is explained here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII
- waqf 14y agoIt's confusing because several algorithms are explained, but I believe they're actually floats in this version. Also it's not a normal PDE because ∂f/∂t is permitted to be an arbitrary functional of f restricted to a fixed-diameter neighborhood of the point, not just an infinitesimal neighborhood.
- jules 14y agoThat's the case for our universe as well, for example d^2x/dt^2 due to gravity for a piece of material is dependent on all other material in the universe.
- tim_hutton 14y agoOriginal post: https://plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/WtPBhYJswAe https://plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/WtPBhYJs... Technical details on the YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I (Two lots of source code available: Stephan's and mine) Other discussions about this: Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/118svz/smoothlife_a_continuous_version_of_conways_game/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/118svz/smoothlife_a... Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/120749/Smoothlife http://www.metafilter.com/120749/Smoothlife
- rm999 14y agoVery cool, thanks for the links! Are you affiliated with the project?
- tim_hutton 14y agoI made an implementation of SmoothLifeL in Ready and this video. Stephan Rafler created the SmoothLife rules and has his own software. Ready is designed to let the user play with a large range of systems like this one, connecting a field of floats to an OpenCL kernel that the user can rewrite on the fly. Check out Ready for some similar patterns, like Robert Munafo's U-Skate world. http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion There's a deep motivation behind all this, which is to try to understand the pattern formation mechanisms that appear in nature and get harnessed by organisms.
- mmagin 14y agoPossibly of similar interest - Ready, a program for exploring continuous valued cellular automata: http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion/ http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion/
- DanBC 14y agoPinchyfingers submitted this link: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628) which goes to a Youtube video of a game of life in a single line of APL. It's a really nice description of the code too. (It's a sale pitch for dynalog - but the best kind where they're just using the tool to do something neat and not pushing their URLs at you.)
- mikeash 14y agoI've watched that video several times and it never occurred to me that it was a sales pitch.
- DanBC 14y agoThat's the best kind of sales pitch. Don't sell it. Just show it. People who want it will be grateful not to have it pushed at them, and people who don't want it will watch it and share it with others, and those other people might want it.
- lolcatssssv 14y agolol
- lolcatssssv 14y agohi
- lolcatssssv 14y agobngbvfdsgd
- jashkenas 14y agoDoes anyone have a JavaScript implementation of the paper? It looks like it would be really fun to play with in <canvas>. Edit Quoth YouTube: "74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460" ... maybe not so fun.
- tlrobinson 14y agoWebCL?
- ghostfish 14y agoBut you missed the most important part of that quote. >"(in Ready, Stephan's software at the sourceforge link above runs much faster)" So using Ready it took a long time, but the actual code is much faster. I'd imagine you could write something in CUDA that would run this (and only this, not something generalized like Ready) plenty fast to do real time rendering on a new system, especially considering a GTX 680 has almost 5x the horsepower of a GTX 460. Admittedly not in a web browser though.
- tim_hutton 14y agoReady is using OpenCL. But Stephan is using FFT for the convolution with a disk filter, which is a big win for large radii.
- ghostfish 14y agoAs far as I'm aware OpenCL performance, while portable, is still somewhat inferior to that of straight CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs, hence my CUDA suggestion. I didn't actually look at the algorithms used in either so I can't comment, perhaps I'll do that tomorrow. What do you mean by using an FFT "for" a convolution? The algorithm is convolving the (presumably 2D) FFT of the game board with a disk filter?
- tim_hutton 14y agoSmoothLife uses two disks around each point to determine the instantaneous rate of change. Inside each disk the values are summed. This is a convolution with a disk filter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution As it says on that page, FFT is often used for convolution because it is fast: after applying a discrete Fourier transform to the kernel and the image, the resulting images must only be multiplied together before applying an inverse FFT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Fourier_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Fourier_transform
- jolohaga 14y agoWish the music were as interesting.
- jes5199 14y agohow close are the rules running here to the standard rules of Conway's Life? I know some of those are supposed to be "gliders" - is it possible to port other shapes from Life into SmoothLife?
- wissler 14y agoNow to try it with complex numbers and/or 3D coordinates.
- tomrod 14y agoThis is one of the most beautiful things I think I've ever seen simulated. Kudos!
- jcampbell1 14y agoWatching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is more worthy of study. There was so much controversy about the book and Wolfram's claims, that I didn't bother with it.
- mck- 14y agoWatching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is getting old (like Tetris). I was actually reading that book at the book store for hours, getting quite intrigued, but at the same time deterred by its size. Perhaps I should give it another shot some day.
- andolanra 14y agoThe general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has some interesting results (e.g. that Rule 110 is Turing-complete) but a lot of the work is summary or rehash of other extant (and often non-cited) material. There are often more thorough, more concise, and more lucid resources on cellular automata from other research; I'd cite Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) off the top of my head for a work that comes to many of Wolfram's conclusions several decades prior to Wolfram. In fact, a good strategy for becoming familiar with cellular automata as a field is to read reviews of ANKOS by people with degrees[1], collect the works and authors mentioned, and trawl them. You'll learn a lot about a lot that way. [1]: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html has an extensive selection of such reviews. EDIT: It's also worthy of note here that Wolfram would reject the original post's model as not worthwhile, as ANKOS explicitly argues that we should reject continuous models in favor of discrete models; indeed, that is the very definition of his "new kind of science."
- lmm 14y agoNote that the proof that Rule 110 is Turing-complete was actually invalid. (Also, like much of the work in the book, it was written by an uncredited employee rather than Wolfram)
- nickknw 14y agoThat's awesome! My project inspired by the Game of Life is quite a bit less ambitious (and still incomplete) - http://nickknowlson.com/projects/conways-revenge/ http://nickknowlson.com/projects/conways-revenge/ It lets multiple cell colonies fight against each other using a modified ruleset.
- jmilloy 14y agoCool! I've been wanting to do this for some time and haven't gotten around to it.
- kasra 14y agoHave you googled "conway's game of life" recently?
- antimora 14y agoYes. Google has nice animation =) https://www.google.com/search?q=Conways+Game+of+Life&sugexp=chrome,mod=14&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Conways+Game+of+Life&sug...
- jcromartie 14y agoI'm not sure if this is as cool as it looks. I guess it's yet to be seen what the larger-scale behavior might be, but it looks like it's just a lot of the same gliders, orbits, and strands between them.
- Pitarou 14y agoSomeone's gonna package this up and sell it as a product, for sure! A 21st century lava lamp.
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- kriro 14y agoThis is fantastic both intellectually and from an artistic point of view. I'm not a fan of electronic music but the music that was picked for the video was perfect.
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