10 ms·
The game of life emulated in the game of life
- pyrotechnick 14y agohttp://golly.sourceforge.net/ http://golly.sourceforge.net/
- huskyr 14y agoThe presence or absence of the eater indicates whether the cell should be on in the next meta-generation. The state of the eater is read by the collision of two antiparallel LWSSes, which radiates two antiparallel gliders (not unlike an electron-positron reaction in a PET scanner). These gliders then collide into beehives, which are restored by a passing LWSS in Brice's elegant honeybit reaction. Reading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :)
- azmenthe 14y agoI was thinking this too. Who spends this many hours with cellular automata to not only classify structures but engineer with them... Is it Mathematicians ? Why ?
- prawks 14y agoPut plainly by Wikipedia[1]: Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. It is interesting for computer scientists, physicists, biologists, biochemists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, generative scientists and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that "design" and "organization" can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway's Life "universe" extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe. If you go deep enough, it really is a fascinating thing. Even more-so given the extreme simplicity of its rules. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life#Origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life#Origins
- azmenthe 14y agoI have always been fascinated with cellular automata. I think they serve a really good purpose in being a "fun" way to approach complexity and it's consequences and I spent more than a few hours playing with game of life programs especially when I was younger. But I am still curious as to who has the time to engineer with them? Is it just "hobbyists" or do some academics derive useful work out from pursuing them?
- ThomPete 14y agoWolfram thinks he do.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> Is it just "hobbyists" or do some academics derive useful work out from pursuing them? The excessive search for "useful work" is one of the bigger problem of academia today. Even the most practical research usually doesn't look useful at the beginning, and pursuing things that seem immediately applicable to real-world problems can be a form of premature optimization. Not to say we shouldn't pursue the "practicality" route at all, but today most research seems to be optimized for short-term money generation and/or fame. Anyway, cellular automata are a separate research field, and I'm pretty sure that some of those game-of-life engineers are academics who are doing this as research because it's fun/interesting. And hail to them, because those hobbyst-scientists create tools that enterpreneurs can forge progress with.
- Someone 14y agoIt's not Conways life, but biologists use cellular automata as models to show that simple rules can create such things as a zebra's stripes, a leopard's spots, the competition between bacterial colonies, development of the human brain, etc. Google "cellular automata in biology" for examples (the first hit I got is http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/pubs/jtb_ca.pdf http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/pubs/jtb_ca.pdf. Twenty years old, but to my outsider's eye, it appears to be a decent overview)
- sp332 14y agoThe most common patterns all have names, just because it's so much easier to talk about a "loaf" than "you know, the sort of triangular one with the corners missing". This page shows the relative frequency of a kind of pattern called "still lifes" http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes but most of the pages linked from there are auto-generated stubs. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Loaf http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Loaf Edit: You're right, people put a lot of time into discovering and engineering things in Life. But it's an odd mix of cleverness and brute-forcing. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis
- Isamu 14y agoI for one. I'm a software engineer, and I'm driven by curiosity. In the 90's I was privileged to belong to a private mailing list that included the likes of John Conway and Bill Gosper and we shared our discoveries in Life and a few other CA. I shared with them my CA discovery that John named "HighLife" and we had some fun with the simple replicator that it supports. Good times. [edit] Someone put a nice animation of the replicator here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighLife http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighLife
- dandrews 14y agoYou make me a bit jealous, rubbing shoulders with Conway and Gosper. Martin Gardner's October 1970 column in SciAm introduced me to cellular automata, and I spent a few hours meticulously tracking generations on a checkerboard before it occurred to me that the university's IBM 1130 was probably better than I was at that sort of thing. Soon friends and I were writing competing Fortran programs for that 1130, monopolizing it all night every night, calculating Life. I corresponded with Gardner once or twice, and subscribed to Robert T. Wainwright's Lifeline newsletter, which had begun a taxonomy of Life objects and reported community progress. Our little group was surprisingly competitive in the beginning, considering the limited resources at our backwater university, but when the MIT group kicked into high gear the exploits of Gosper, Woods and others at MIT were simply mind blowing. Woods' Atavist backtracker, Gosper's Glider Gun, the first discovery of a Garden-of-Eden configuration... who could compete with that? And Gosper continued to amaze with his astonishing Breeder. Conway's GoL inspired other acquaintances, electrical engineers. One of them built a special-purpose computer to compute generations; he'd have surprised to know then that the computer was Turing-complete. Another EE pal built a crude raster display for the lab's Nova 1220 mini, with the specific intent to display GoL generations. Hardly such a thing as glass TTYs in those days, kids. Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.
- merlincorey 14y ago> Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation. Scan them! And drink, the Stone, of course.
- maushu 14y agoReading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :) Which creates some disturbing ideas about our reality.
- stevenrace 14y agoPerhaps 'intriguing' is the better term. I'd implore everyone to spend a few rainy weekends trudging through Mandelbrot's 'The Fractal Geometry of Nature'[1] and Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'[2]. Both are rather terse, but I found both added a whole new depth of analogy in the way I see the Universe(s). It's easy to be dismissive of Stephen Wolfram for his general asshat'ery and Benoit isn't around to champion his notions in the broader sense. But if we are to take reductivism to it's extreme, it's worth exploring emergent patterns with a bit more wonderment. [1] http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature.html?id=0R2LkE3N7-oC http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_... [2] http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
- AngrySkillzz 14y agoI don't know if one could call NKS terse, at over 1000 pages. It was a very enjoyable and mildly enlightening read, I'd recommend it, but I'd really like to see his theories fleshed out in a more formal way. It was a bit heavy on conjecture and speculation for me.
- mck- 14y ago"What is the Game of Life"
- lukifer 14y agoWhen discussing the idea that our universe is simulated, often the assumption is that it's an experiment by aliens or somesuch. But recently I've started to wonder if our parent universe is nearly identical to our own, and we are one of millions of virtual Earths used for political and economic predictions, because if (when) we could, that's exactly what we would do.
- k00pa 14y agoThat background sound is annoying...
- leeoniya 14y agoYo Dawg! But more seriously, is that carefully arranged structure required for it to work as shown? It seems a slight variation would cause it to evolve into disarray.
- danielatc 14y agoThere even is a 3D version of the SmoothLife algorithm out there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxaOnOVGepI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxaOnOVGepI Very very cool stuff!
- jmaygarden 14y agoInteresting! It reminds me a little bit of a lava lamp.
- vastinfest 14y agoNah.. I better wait for the game of life emulated in the game of life emulated in the game of life.. Sorry.. I was forced at a gunpoint to do that..
- bockris 14y agoAt which level do you mean this game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(board_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(board_game) ;-)
- espinchi 14y agoI'll go get the mop to clean up the pieces of my brain that are now all over the floor. After spending some time before reading up on the Game of Life, I'm amazed by this meta implementation. By the way, why not go on and on recursively?
- rauljara 14y agoAccording to the wikipedia link(http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel), each meta cell has 64691 actual cells. So to do a 100x100 grid once is 646,910,000 bits, or about 77 mb of storage at one bit per cell[1]. To do a 100x100 grid recursively just once would be 4.75 peta-bytes. Each cell would also have to be touched at least once per frame, so without even getting into drawing the damn thing we're talking about super computer levels of processing power. [1] Unless you cheat by taking advantage of the fact that most of the cells are just repeats of each other. But cheating doesn't seem anywhere near as awesome. edit--- That was actually a gross underestimation. The bounding box on the meta pixels is 4235364 cells, or about 65 times as many I said. So it's about 4.9 GB to do a 100x100 grid without any recursion. It's 643 zetabytes (2^70) to do it recursively once. It kind of makes me think that whoever did the video might have cheated even for that small animation.
- raganwald 14y ago"Cheating" by taking advantage of repetition is exactly how Bill Gosper's famous "HashLife" implementation handles really huge universes. Here's my implementation in CoffeeScript, written in the "Williams Style:" http://recursiveuniver.se http://recursiveuniver.se
- rubidium 14y agoSimply amazing. I hadn't heard about "Life enthusiasts" until reading the linked articles in the post. The OTCA metapixel (http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel) is what allows this to work. I bet Dwarf Fortress and Life enthusiasts would get along.
- dexen 14y agoRegarding the movie -- to show the 3rd level just as well, camera should pan out to include the programmer ;-)
- jamesrcole 14y agoI think GoL unit cells http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Unit_cell http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Unit_cell like this demonstrate an important point. That there's certain limitations to our knowledge of reality. Imagine an intelligent being in a GoL board, made of a huge pattern of cells (just like we're made of a huge number of atoms). Even though when we look at a GoL board, we know it's made up of cells and that everything operates according to a fixed number of rules, this intelligent being wouldn't just be able to know this. It's perceptual system would be made of these elements (perhaps it somehow uses spaceships to find out about what is out there). Remember that you can't just "see" reality - you need inputs and to infer what's out there on the basis of them. The sort of view of its reality it could infer would be much more coarsely grained than at the level of individual cells, just as our unaided view of reality is much more coarsely grained than the level of individual atoms. That intelligent GoL being could observe the way things behave and, on the basis of this, theorise the GoL rules - that everything was a bunch of cells, and that if there's an empty cell and it has three neighbours then that cell will be 'on' in the next moment, and so forth. And if it existed in a 'standard' Game of Life board, it would have theorised correctly. But if it lived in a Game of Life board where each of the cells it has posited is actually one of these unit cells like in the linked page, then there would be a deeper reality than it realises (and of course there could be 'deeper levels' within that). There's no way that GoL being could tell.
- jerf 14y agoGeneralized: There's no way to know which Turing Complete substrate we are "truly" running on. We can examine the parameters of our system and hypothesize which rules are the most parsimonious to produce the system we live in in the Occam's Razor sense, but we can't prove it.
- d2vid 14y agoHow about triggering a buffer overflow? Assuming the Turing Complete substrate doesn't have infinite memory, maybe we can break out ;)
- 14y ago
- jared314 14y agoIf you also implemented it on other GOL variants (pentagonal, hexagonal, multicolored) it would be a virtual machine. Makes me want to build a compiler back-end for one of the GOL turing machines.
- VoterMan3 14y agoMind = Blown!
- voodoochilo 14y agothis is awesome!
- eranation 14y agoHere is the video that inspired this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw
- dllthomas 14y agoIt is completely unsurprising that this is possible - GoL is turing complete and obviously we can run GoL on turing equivalent systems. It is really awesome that someone was able to do the attendant engineering work.
- lelf 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6aP9S9rEQk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6aP9S9rEQk — all the way down
- shocks 14y agoSave yourself and mute the video.
- sakai 14y agoBizarre / incredible timing. I just created an interactive D3.js implementation of Conway's Game of Life yesterday: http://boydgreenfield.com/conwayjs/ http://boydgreenfield.com/conwayjs/ Would love to hear peoples' thoughts... (And sorry for the promotion)
- dchichkov 14y agoThe size of the field, is it fixed or growing? I guess, if it is fixed, this implementation still needs some work... Either way, I think that Turing Machine with infinitely growing stacks [see http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm] is a way cooler.
- joezydeco 14y agoI'm gonna wake up and get flushed out a sewer pipe, aren't I?
- unabridged 14y agoMy favorite thing to do with metacells is to destroy a small part of one of them and watch the chaos. Digital cancer.
- obsession 14y agoThis was surprisingly fun to do. Adding just one cell in the right place destroyed the whole metagame.
- digeridoo 14y agoI never quite get the excitement over game of life (is emergent behaviour really that surprising?), but this is extremely impressive.
- Cbasedlifeform 14y agoAmazing... I'm old enough (sigh) to remember reading about Life in a Martin Gardner column 40 years ago and playing it on a piece of graph paper.
- TheEzEzz 14y agoIt should be possible to make a closed loop video. When you zoom out to the full meta level it is exactly the same as the initial frame of the movie. Then the whole thing can be looped seamless forever, as you zoom out to meta-meta-meta levels.
- po 14y agoAlso interesting to nerds like me is that the annoying audio in the video is a seemingly always-increasing tone called a Shepard Tone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone edit: …and now reading that I've stumbled across the Tritone paradox which I wasn't familiar with and is equally cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone_paradox http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=206 http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=206