dvgrn

9 ms·

61.
by dvgrn 4y ago
It's not impossible that we could come up with a way of crashing less than 15 moving objects together to get an alternate RCT pattern. Gliders are generally considered to be the "lowest common denominator", though, so adding
62.
by dvgrn 4y ago
15 is probably not the minimum. There are some ideas floating around for getting down to 14, and some wilder ideas that might get to 13 or 12. Below that we'd need some significantly different mechanism that nobody has thought of yet.
63.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Heh, oddly enough, the RCT can probably be better thought of as a way of explosively _decompressing_ a glider construction recipe. There are lots and lots of reasonable-sized recipes for constructing different patterns. When you apply the R
64.
by dvgrn 4y ago
That's definitely completely true. We can specify the relative positions of the initial gliders at each of the three corners of the RCT pattern in just a few dozen bytes. But the number that says how far apart those corners are from e
65.
by dvgrn 4y ago
I think that was just saying "more space between initial gliders implies a longer time needed to complete construction". There's no Einsteinian relativity to be found here. (A Doppler effect does show up in Conway's Life
66.
by dvgrn 4y ago
It's a bit hard to see how this RCT trick could be useful for reducing anything besides the number of gliders. RCT is basically one very unreasonable end of a wide spectrum: you can use a very small number of gliders to build somethin
67.
by dvgrn 4y ago
I think the biggest prerequisite for getting good at "advanced GoL" is just an unreasonable amount of patience. Probably I'm a good case in point. I'm definitely not a particularly clever mathematician, but it seems like
68.
by dvgrn 4y ago
There have been a lot of GoL variants over the years, but I don't remember running into any attempts to vary the speed of evolution in different locations on the same grid. The idea that all neighbors move to the next tick simultaneous
69.
by dvgrn 4y ago
Ha -- when was that written?... Let's see, the original form of the statement showed up in 2012: "Some patterns require a very large number (scores, even hundreds) of glider collisions..." At that time Andrew Wade had alread
70.
by dvgrn 4y ago
For about twenty years, 1992 through 2012 or so, there was an invite-only "LifeCA" Conway's Life mailing list where a lot of the in-depth research and collaboration tended to happen. That was certainly a good surviving pocket
71.
by dvgrn 4y ago
I think I'd rather have a hand-cranked mechanical design, along the lines of Babbage's Difference Engine -- or maybe something steam-powered. Maybe patch together a few hundred Whac-A-Mole games somehow.
72.
by dvgrn 4y ago
You're most welcome! The project was "in the works" for several years, and it was a very pleasant surprise when it became clear sometime in 2021 that we were actually going to be able to get it completed and out the door by t
73.
by dvgrn 5y ago
There was also some early discussion of the result by the authors on the ConwayLife Lounge on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/357922255553953794/370571014654...
74.
by dvgrn 5y ago
I suspect this will get written up in a paper relatively soon, but it's too new for the journal wheels to have turned far enough yet. The original ... publicization, if not publication ... was in a post on the conwaylife.com forums, a
75.
by dvgrn 5y ago
Right -- this discovery is about identical states extending into the past, not into the future. A Conway's Life pattern that has to stay the same into the indefinite future would be an impenetrable wall, and we don't know of any s
76.
by dvgrn 6y ago
The article mentions a couple of new spaceship discoveries from 2020, the Speed Demonoid and the doo-dah spaceship (look them up in the LifeWiki). But it came out just slightly too soon to be able to mention a third one that was discovered
77.
by dvgrn 6y ago
Conway's Life technology has come a long way since it first showed up in Scientific American fifty years ago, when most people were using Go stones or graph paper to explore it. Now you can run a script in the latest version (4.0) of G
78.
New “Speed Demonoid” Spaceship in Conway's Game of Life(conwaylife.com)
2 points by dvgrn 6y ago|1 comments
79.
by dvgrn 7y ago
The video explanation of the Life metacell is from 7:35 to 13:05. It's really nice to finally have some good pictures showing how the 0E0P works. Until now it's been kind of a black box, just because the pattern is so impressivel
80.
by dvgrn 8y ago
A self-constructing "0E0P" Conway's Life metacell is finally in working order! The structure behaves like a single cell, obeying the rules of Life or whatever CA rule it's programmed to emulate. Unlike previous metacell
81.
Fully self-directed replication(cp4space.wordpress.com)
48 points by dvgrn 8y ago|4 comments
82.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Von Neumann's 29 states were custom designed to make it easy to construct passive configurations, similar to the way a 3D printer builds things -- one layer at a time. You can't do that in Conway's Life, because stable patter
83.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Does the starting point have to be Javascript? If so, a good bet might be this HashLife Javascript implementation: https://copy.sh/life/?gist=31aa52b9430970a28e4c199444e5a873 If not, well, Golly is open-source, cross-p
84.
by dvgrn 9y ago
LifeViewer has evolved in a somewhat different direction from the original LifeView, and is still a work in progress -- Chris has been contributing a lot of useful LifeViewer functionality to http://golly.sf.net , and vice versa
85.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Everyone would be completely floored if someone built a gun for the new knightship. It's likely to be several orders of magnitude harder to find a glider synthesis for the knightship, than it was to find the knightship itself. To buil
86.
by dvgrn 9y ago
There are in fact various 3D rules that can be made to behave exactly like Conway's Life -- starting with some discoveries by Carter Bays involving a two-cell-thick "sandwich" of Life cells that emulated standard Conway&#x2
87.
by dvgrn 9y ago
If you have Javascript enabled, then there are several places that should work: the Sir Robin LifeWiki article http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Sir_Robin the original link (via the Show in Viewer option), or the Catagolue p
88.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Certainly with a good cube you _could_ hold the outside and push to twist a center slice. From www.cube20.org -- "We consider any twist of any face to be one move (this is known as the half-turn metric.)" Also, "New results:
89.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Yup, the "c" in spaceship speeds, like "(2,1)c/6", is the same c as in "E=mc^2". It's a good analogy -- one cell per cycle is the maximum possible speed that information can travel in the Life univer
90.
by dvgrn 9y ago
Yeah, Problem 1 definitely is a (very difficult) open problem, not likely to be solved any time soon. Problem 2 just looks to me like a known fact, not really a problem... and Problem 3 is only a problem if you don't accept the standar

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