[HN Gopher] The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life (2...
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       The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life (2020)
        
       Author : Petiver
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2021-02-18 23:36 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://archive.is/88J9w
        
       | lalaithion wrote:
       | Sad to see no mention of the fact that we have built computers in
       | Game of Life, including one that can play tetris:
       | https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...
        
         | seph-reed wrote:
         | There is one mention of it in one of the quotes.
         | 
         | > Melanie Mitchell -- Professor of complexity, Santa Fe
         | Institute
         | 
         | Given that Conway's proof that the Game of Life can be made to
         | simulate a Universal Computer -- that is, it could be
         | "programmed" to carry out any computation that a traditional
         | computer can do -- the extremely simple rules can give rise to
         | the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible
        
         | leephillips wrote:
         | The video at the top of the article seems to be a depiction of
         | a computer made in Life that encodes Life.
         | 
         | Melanie Mitchell's comment, early in the article, mentions that
         | fact that you are sad to see no mention of.
        
       | news_to_me wrote:
       | Satisfying to see Kjetil Golid's work mentioned -- one of my
       | favorite artists!
       | 
       | https://www.katevassgalerie.com/kjetil-golid
        
         | blacksmith_tb wrote:
         | Yes, great stuff - his own site has some works you can tinker
         | with, too[1], along with links to the source[2].
         | 
         | 1: https://generated.space/sketch/ornament/ 2:
         | https://github.com/kgolid/ornament
        
           | motohagiography wrote:
           | Thank you for linking this, super cool. His piece on Byrne's
           | Euclid is amazing: https://generated.space/sketch/byrne-
           | proofs/
        
       | seph-reed wrote:
       | Fun debate: Does "Conways Game of Life" constitute a universe? If
       | so, do those forms within it have life?
        
         | OscarCunningham wrote:
         | It's hard to make structures in CGoL that are robust to
         | collisions. So if you randomly initialised the universe I
         | suspect you would never get life, because any complex structure
         | that did arise would crash into random junk and be destroyed as
         | soon as it tried to move.
        
           | undreren wrote:
           | If all nodes had a 1:1,000,000,000 chance to randomly flip
           | every tick, then resilient structures would probably arise
           | eventually, given a very large (or infinite) board.
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-19 23:01 UTC)