dvgrn

7 ms·

1.
by dvgrn 10mo ago
Adam P. Goucher's pi-calculator pattern is quite elegant, I'd say. It prints the decimal digits in-universe, with Conway's Life blocks for pixels. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Pi_calculator
2.
by dvgrn 10mo ago
Would you be satisfied with a Lisp implementation? https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life That shares the impressive inefficiencies of the Quest for Tetris project, though. For something that's much more practi
3.
by dvgrn 10mo ago
This is one of those tricky things, highly dependent on context. If you're talking about Conway's Game of Life patterns, then "gliders" are the 5-cell spaceships that travel diagonally, and all other moving things are &q
4.
by dvgrn 10mo ago
> There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know... Actually more than one true replicator has been constructed. The 0E0P metacell https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell can be programmed to
5.
by dvgrn 2y ago
There are also patterns -- both stable patterns and oscillators -- that have an unbounded chain of predecessors, but still can't be glider constructed. That is, there are proven solutions to Conway's "Unique Father Problem&
6.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Thanks, that's a big help! I think actually the Conway's Life community does quite regularly have "interesting things" that could fit the Show HN model. The example I'm thinking most about is the fixed-cost 15-glid
7.
by dvgrn 2y ago
People have definitely tried this kind of thing, but so far -- from what I've seen -- Game of Life problems seem to be highly resistant to neural-net types of solutions. Take spaceships, for example. You can train a neural net to reco
8.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I took a day off of work yesterday to try this AMA idea out, and I'm thinking it turned out pretty well all in all. It was definitely a one-time experiment, though, not something I'll do again. Something just occurred to me from
9.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Heh, I'm not actually sure whether Nathaniel meant to invoke Eric Raymond's hacker emblem on the book cover or not. The grid is there, and the glider orientation is right, but the cells are squares and not circles. That orientat
10.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I'm thinking the most successful "automated exploration" so far has been Catagolue's method: simply generate a whole lot of random-soup initial configurations, run them until they settle, and then poke through the ashes
11.
by dvgrn 2y ago
There's definitely plenty of material for a Volume II book (and several volumes after that, for that matter). At the moment, though, Nathaniel and I think that it might be somebody else's turn to write those! https:/&#x2F
12.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Definitely I have lots more to say about 15-glider universal construction! It was a really exceptionally interesting collaboration, where several people working together were able to complete something that would have taken any one person a
13.
by dvgrn 2y ago
My sense is that people don't usually play the Immigration Game for very long -- it just doesn't seem all that interesting to most folks ... and so there hasn't been much interest in developing a computer opponent for the gam
14.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I don't want to say that there's no possible role for AI in Life research, but it's hard to see how something like ChatGPT can be helpful. 1) The placement of a single cell in a huge pattern will very often make the differenc
15.
by dvgrn 2y ago
-- It's interesting to look at the different symmetries on Catagolue, where the idea is to generate a lot of random soups with different symmetry types, and then just run those patterns and see what comes out. The D8_1 and D8_4 symmet
16.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I'm not -- I'm just more of a Conway's Game of Life expert than 99.9999% of the world's population. But that's just due to experience and invested time, not cleverness. Could probably add at least one more nine to
17.
by dvgrn 2y ago
It's made a lot of Lifenthusiasts happy, and that's not nothing I suppose. It has also taught a lot of people a little something about the likelihood of emergence of complex behavior from very simple iterated rules. And maybe you
18.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Yup, it doesn't take a very big starting pattern to produce likely infinite novelty -- though it's not always easy to prove that any given pattern won't eventually unexpectedly "go boring" due to some kind of unexpe
19.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Ha, well, I've mostly successfully dodged the various Wolfram-science questions so far. I just finished reading a book on cosmology -- VSL theory -- but honestly a lot this kind of thing seems to be way too far above my personal abstra
20.
by dvgrn 2y ago
I don't know about "concise", but one place to start for references is the LifeWiki. We've been trying to extend the non-Conway's-Life part of the wiki for a few years now, to cover more of the OCA space ("Othe
21.
by dvgrn 2y ago
We've tried a lot of different methods over time. Currently the LifeWiki -- https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page -- is the most likely central location; any sufficiently big news will probably find its way i
22.
by dvgrn 2y ago
That background seems pretty cool as it is -- I like the changing colors. Maybe try playing with depth as well, along the lines of the T=450 point of the LifeViewer demo pattern here https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Life
23.
by dvgrn 2y ago
The "spawn as much dots as possible" sounds like a spacefiller: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spacefiller But that's maybe a little too static for the "creating as much gliders as possible"
24.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Heh, yes, the comparison to chess is a very good one. You probably need a similar level of focus and dedication to be a good Life pattern engineer or a good chess player -- and that level of focus is something that improves with enough prac
25.
by dvgrn 2y ago
This is a very good question, but I'm not sure I can give a very good answer. I'm not sure the "probability" part of the question is even well-defined, let alone answerable, unless you state a specific rulespace -- two-s
26.
by dvgrn 2y ago
It was _kind of_ a historical accident, in the sense that if we ran history over again, it wouldn't be too surprising to see an alternate-history "Conway's Life" with a rule like "B36/S23" (HighLife) inste
27.
by dvgrn 2y ago
And what are these hypothetical candidates interviewing for, exactly? In the '80s and '90s, every time I got a new computer, one of the first things I'd do is write a very simple CGoL simulator, and then sit back and marvel a
28.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Heh -- "if you need more than one line of APL you do not fully understand your problem". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041500 People have done similar things in all kinds of languages by now: http
29.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Hadn't heard of it. Looks like it was removed sometime in the 90's, maybe, so it's not too likely that there would be a good video of it in action. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xzy
30.
by dvgrn 2y ago
Question 1: There are really surprisingly few "standard libraries" or tools for this kind of thing. You would think we'd have a CA editor capable of doing object-based editing by this time -- like, copy in a complete device m

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