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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. Like supposedly the universe we live i

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. 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 ago
check out hashlife and some of the larger landscapes.
- dgreensp 14y ago
  Thank 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 ago
    Mind 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 ago
      hashlife 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 ago
no 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 ago
  Outstanding, thank you for this. Worth a post on its own don't you think?
  - saraid216 14y ago
    That'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 ago
    It 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 ago
  And you can run that in real time on a desktop. The secret is a hash life approach.
psc 14y ago
Well, 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 ago
  All 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.

evoxed 14y ago

> no computer can do that of course Just check the frontpage again in a few years.

tisme 14y ago

check out hashlife and some of the larger landscapes.

dgreensp 14y ago
Thank 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 ago
  Mind 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 ago
    hashlife 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 ago

no 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 ago
Outstanding, thank you for this. Worth a post on its own don't you think?
- saraid216 14y ago
  That'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 ago
  It 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 ago
And you can run that in real time on a desktop. The secret is a hash life approach.

psc 14y ago

Well, 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 ago
All 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.