dvgrn

7 ms·

31.
by dvgrn 2y ago
The relatively-big, relatively-new thing at the moment is the application of SAT solvers to CGoL problems. Donald Knuth got the ball rolling on this, but we're still in the very early days of seeing what is possible with SAT solvers. E
32.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Langton's Ant is one of many, many CA rules that run for a while, seeming to be "predictably unpredictable" -- creating lots of blobby chaos -- but then produce a highly recognizable emergent phenomenon (the final "highw
33.
by dvgrn 2y ago
It's going to have to be the opposite of trial and error, I would think -- though maybe in some sense some of the underlying searches for useful predecessors of patterns like Sir Robin could count as "directed super-high-speed tri
34.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Heh, well, I'm speaking as somebody who was fairly obsessed with making Rube Goldberg domino chains as a kid, spending hours at a time covering a large oak trestle table with precarious stacks of wooden blocks, rulers, tape cases, stri
35.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I've never had a good short answer to this kind of question. It's much more of a twenty-page essay question, with a lot of subtleties to dive into. I've tangentially crossed paths with Stephen Wolfram off and on for a bit ov
36.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I did a bit of homework before posting this, and there were just enough Hacker News hits on "AMA" (from Sam Altman, Peter Roberts, etc.) that it didn't look like there would be any harm in trying this experiment. I could cert
37.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I'd say there's no shortage of demonstrations of complexity emerging from the iteration of simple rules -- fractals like the Mandelbrot set, simple edge-matching rules for aperiodic tilings, the logistic map, etc., etc. What makes
38.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I think SmoothLife and Lenia are great fun -- lots of highly watchable "eye candy" tends to get produced by those types of experiments. The better you get at running experiments, the more new behavior you can turn up: https:&
39.
by dvgrn 2y ago
There have been a lot of "wow" moments in my Life career, watching complexity emerge out of the repeated application of simple rules -- but I guess I'd say that it was more a confirmation of things that I thought I knew alrea
40.
by dvgrn 2y ago
"Soup searching" generally means not looking for anything in particular. It just involves setting up a random initial configuration, letting it run until it stabilises ("goes boring") and then takes a census of what&#x27
41.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Yup, the Quest for Tetris project caused an entertaining stir for a while. The people that worked on that were the best kind of "hacker" -- fearless experimenters who didn't let their lack of Life-specific knowledge get in th
42.
by dvgrn 2y ago
A really impressive number of discoveries have been made since 2001 -- there's been kind of a proliferation of new sub-fields, so it seems like there's never any shortage of things for newcomers to work on. There are definitely ar
43.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Yup, there's an increasing amount of GPU use these days, mostly related to soup searching -- see https://catagolue.hatsya.com/home for the software and a tabulation of results from the last several years of collaborati
44.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Yes, please -- I'd like to hear more about that! I've got the poem memorized, but mostly what I know about it is that Carroll thought of the last line first -- "For the Snark _was_ a Boojum, you see." and ended up writin
45.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Not quite, unfortunately! I almost had the opportunity, briefly, in 2019 when I was contributing some patterns to a short film that Will Cavendish was working on with Conway, called "Thoughts on Life": https://www.t
46.
by dvgrn 2y ago
If a glider shows up somewhere by accident, like in an an otherwise random-looking arrangement of floor or wall tiles in a bathroom or somewhere, then I'll certainly pick it out immediately (and be unwarrantedly cheerful for the next h
47.
by dvgrn 2y ago
These days, without knowing more about preferred programming language or the purpose of the implementation, I'd probably start by pointing to this very thorough series of blog posts by Eric Lippert, from LifeWiki/Tutorials: ht
48.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Heh, I think I can find answers for "surprising" a lot more easily than for "useful". The main practical use for Conway's Life is as a teaching tool, giving a nice explorable example of layers upon layers of incred
49.
by dvgrn 2y ago
It's hard to choose one these days -- a whole pile of open problems actually got solved in the last few years, like omniperiodicity, glider syntheses of really complicated things like spacefillers, fixed-cost universal construction (it
50.
by dvgrn 2y ago
There's been quite a lot of experimentation with 3D versions of Conway's Life -- including rules where you can easily emulate Life on a 2D slice of the 3D plane. Carter Bays did some investigations and published papers back in th
51.
AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life
313 points by dvgrn 2y ago|151 comments
52.
by dvgrn 3y ago
There have been some experiments along these lines for "hat" tilings: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=161571#p161571 As far as I know, HatLife hasn't been adjusted to make SpectreLife
53.
by dvgrn 3y ago
Actually, that was the way I read it -- was going to post something about that but then noticed you'd already brought up the idea. If every word in the title weren't capitalized (as titles usually are) then I think the title would
54.
by dvgrn 4y ago
The reference that comes to mind for me is something out of one of Martin Gardner's _Aha! Insight_ books from decades ago -- the idea of encoding something like the Encyclopedia Britannica into one big long bitstring, then converting i
55.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Heh, yes, same here more or less -- I wrote an assembly-code Life program for my family's first personal computer (TRS-80 Model I) in the early 1980s, then mostly forgot all about Life for almost two decades ... until it became possibl
56.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Yup, the connection to self-replication has showed up mostly in the discussion here, in relation to true self-replicating patterns like the https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell -- which does have a few vaguely cel
57.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Heh, not necessarily , that's true, in the sense that all the possible arrangements haven't been tested and shown to be constructible. On the other hand, pseudo-still-life and quasi-still-life arrangements are much easier to cons
58.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Definitely! It's hard to summarize that insight in any kind of concise way, though ... The Game of Life universe seems a bit too "fragile" to allow for the kind of emergent complexity that real-world physics supports. We can
59.
by dvgrn 4y ago
(Not just any such pattern, though -- a still life also means that it doesn't change when you evolve it according to Life rules.)
60.
by dvgrn 4y ago
If you want to see what these 21-bit still lifes look like, their glider construction recipes are all stored online, on Catagolue (no, that's not a misspelling): https://catagolue.appspot.com/census/b3s23/synt

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