[HN Gopher] Conways Game of Life on Blockchain
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Conways Game of Life on Blockchain
Author : jeromeof
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-03-08 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fallingknife wrote:
| You could put it on a side chain. On matic gas is essentially
| free.
| NotJamie wrote:
| We need to go deeper. Game of life Mona Lisa on the block chain.
| Could end up rivaling the value of the actual Mona Lisa.
| jeromeof wrote:
| The most expensive implementation of Conway's Game of Life ever -
| over $2,000 per step! (Probably the slowest too!)
| fallingknife wrote:
| Kind of amazing that a super slow, super expensive computing
| architecture like this has actually turned out to be very
| useful for some things.
| ddeyar wrote:
| How much would it cost on Tezos?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Then try to calculate the energy / processing power spent per
| step.
| Taek wrote:
| The electricity isn't just paying for the one transaction
| it's paying to secure all historical transactions and all
| current balances.
|
| When counting how expensive a visa transaction is, you don't
| also consider the price of all the bank vaults in the world
| and the staff protecting those vaults, because protecting
| existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new
| transactions.
| ggggtez wrote:
| There is a point to be made, but you've made it all wrong.
|
| You could argue that the $2000 transaction is actually
| validating all previous transactions... which sure. I will
| grant you that.
|
| But by that reasoning, you need to amortize _all future
| purchases_ as paying for part of the Game of Life
| transaction! If you do that then the cost of the
| transaction approaches _INFINITY DOLLARS_ as time goes to
| infinity!
|
| Obviously, this way of looking at the cost of the
| transaction is useless to the point of being meaningless.
| So let's stick with $2000, which has a clear meaning in
| reality.
| Taek wrote:
| The security isn't there to protect historic
| transactions, it's there to protect the holdings of
| current holders. If I had a bitcoin at one point and no
| longer have that bitcoin, I'm completely indifferent
| about the security of the transactions involving that
| bitcoin because it no longer impacts me.
|
| Also, the cost per transaction - even if viewed through
| that lens - does not approach infinity as time goes to
| infinity because there would be an infinite number of
| transactions as well.
| jcoder wrote:
| I honestly can't tell which model you're arguing in favor
| of.
| Taek wrote:
| The proof-of-work mechanism for blockchains is broken
| into two elements. There's the inflation element, which
| is a reward for miners that is independent of transaction
| volume, and then there's the transaction fee element.
|
| The inflation element exists to secure the blockchain,
| and is proportional to the total amount of value being
| held on the blockchain. As the coin price goes up
| (independent of any transaction activity), the amount of
| reward for PoW mining also goes up. It doesn't make sense
| to count this part of the PoW reward a cost of
| transacting because the purpose is unrelated to
| transacting and also if transacting completely halts the
| expense does not go away.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling
| new transactions.
|
| But for blockchain, those are the same thing. You cannot
| add new transactions to the blockchain without doing the
| work to secure it.
| Taek wrote:
| Yes you can. If the token price falls substantially and
| the fee pressure disappears you can continue transacting
| without adding work to secure the blockchain.
|
| This is actually one of the largest open problems for
| Bitcoin. In a few years, the inflation will drop below a
| point where it is enough to secure the blockchain,
| meaning the security of Bitcoin is entirely dependent on
| revenue from transaction fees, which only exist if there
| are more transactions trying to get into blocks than
| there is block space to hold the transactions.
|
| If Bitcoin doesn't have enough transaction demand, you
| will be able to transact on bitcoin for nearly free
| without contributing to the security at all, which is a
| very bad thing for Bitcoin as a whole.
| eoo wrote:
| Assuming some market efficiency, those fees should be fairly
| similar to the cost to process that transaction into a block,
| so, 2,000 usd
| Taek wrote:
| This assumes that there's no inflation I believe. But on
| Ethereum there is inflation.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Until EIP 1559 goes into effect in July, then it might
| vary between deflationary and inflationary at times.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Is -this-, finally, the killer app? or, the way
| Skynet comes about?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| No. And No.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > No. And No.
|
| I thought as much ...
|
| (At least you've taken the time to reply - even to a tongue
| in cheek comment - instead of taking to the downvotes, which
| I appreciate ...)
|
| Considering EVM fees, I find it endlessly fascinating that
| people are paying for computation per cycle, on a distributed
| VM.-
|
| It blows one away ...
|
| (Also, a pity that Conway is not here to opine on this.)
| Noxmiles wrote:
| Please, stop it. Some things just shouldn't be.
| kemonocode wrote:
| It's deployed in a test network. The carbon footprint of this
| little experiment is negligible:
|
| "This application would be able to run 'forever' - so long as
| there was some funds in an Ethereum account that could be used
| to run each 'step'.
|
| However, the cost of Ethereum (and therefore 'gas') used to run
| smart contracts is so high that it would cost (in March 2021)
| over $80 just to register the smart contract, and to run a
| single 'step' of the game would cost over $2,000! No doubt that
| the code could be made more efficient and consume less
| resources, but hey that's just too much work for a concept app,
| so I have simply registered the contract on the Kovan test
| network instead, and use some 'fake' Ethereum to run the
| system. The app is the same, but it just points to the 'Kovan'
| test network instead of the Ethereum mainnet."
| eriktrautman wrote:
| Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly
| with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and
| it will run forever.
|
| Hell, I'll give you the tokens myself just to see it go!
|
| Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript
| https://docs.near.org/
| ivadim wrote:
| NEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create
| "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably
| the slowest too!)" :D NEAR is perfect to run a high performance
| simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/
| where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the
| meanwhile
| inspirehep wrote:
| Suggestion- Could we implement soup search with the
| blockchain?(https://catagolue.hatsya.com/apgsearch)
|
| The 'largest distributed search site of cellular automata',
| Catagolue, which discovers new patterns everyday, has enormous
| potential of pattern finding, trading and synchronous exhibiting.
| Could we embed soup search as a backend PoW
| i_love_limes wrote:
| If I could buy an NFT of the source code of this, would I have
| reached peak blockchain meta?
| Adrock wrote:
| Not peak, since someone will eventually buy the NFT for this HN
| comment.
| Kiro wrote:
| Minting NFTs of NFTs is the next level.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| I may have beat that, the day before Jack Dorsey blew up the
| service I bid on the tweet of the CryptoKitties Genesis NFT.
|
| So a NFT of a Tweet of an NFT.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Only if you used chainlink to mint a new NFT per step. Then
| staked the NFTs on a different chain using a trust less bridge.
| Igelau wrote:
| Quiet, they'll hear you.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Not without first writing a spec for adding NFTs to bitcoin,
| I'm afraid.
| [deleted]
| klingon78 wrote:
| Could undecidability similar to that of Conway or another halting
| problem be used to better solve security of financial
| transactions?
|
| If it's ubersecure maybe it would outperform Moore's Law, quantum
| computing, and the hyper-intelligent AIs.
| [deleted]
| tempodox wrote:
| So, is there proof of work for every single cell transition?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| In the category "how can I contribute the most to the global
| climate change problem", we have a contender.
| a_hard_time wrote:
| Every HN thread relating to blockchain turns into either a)
| immediate dismissal of blockchain or b) immediate dismissal of
| blockchain based on its carbon footprint. Frankly, this is
| boring and repetitive. If you have no actual contribution to
| make, perhaps don't clutter every thread with the same
| critiques which have been discussed a thousand times before.
| flixic wrote:
| I absolutely love this.
|
| One of the more poetic reasons why I like Ethereum VM is because
| it seems likely to keep running for a very, very long time. I
| would take a Long Bet that it will still exist 100 years in the
| future.
|
| With that in mind, this might end up being the longest
| "continuously running" (both words with some heavy qualifiers)
| Conway's Game of Life implementation.
| joosters wrote:
| Never mind 100 years in the future, this game of life
| implementation isn't running even _now_. As the article says,
| it would cost $80 just to register the code to run it, never
| mind funding each compute step.
|
| And yet your phone could compute the next 100 years of this
| ethereum GoL calculations in far less than a second!
| flixic wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on my phone's processor being functional in
| the XXIInd century, but this code will likely still be in
| EVM, ready to run.
|
| Sure, it's a very different beast, but I still find it really
| _cool_.
| joosters wrote:
| But that's my point, _it is already NOT in the EVM_ , the
| cost is so high that the author didn't commit the code to
| it - ethereum fell at the very first hurdle!
| zadler wrote:
| Unfortunately for naysayers, Ethereum or other
| blockchains will achieve cheap and long running dapps
| sooner or later.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| _Next year on the blockchain!_
| vages wrote:
| "Naysayers"? Technologies do not prove themselves in a
| court of opinion. They prove themselves in the field.
| Critics are essential to any emerging technology; their
| criticism gives us a chance to fix its weaknesses.
|
| That being said, The Paris Agreement and I hope you're
| right.
| bluescrn wrote:
| People will still be able to play Super Mario Bros, even
| though the last NES will be long gone. Code of any real
| value will be preserved by enthusiasts, and be run via
| emulation or ported to modern systems.
|
| Meanwhile, most of todays blockchains will be dead. No
| nodes left to sync with. Maybe the blockchain concept will
| live on in a new form, but even now, there seem to be dying
| blockchains that are very difficult to connect to and use
| (e.g. Dogecoin, at least before the recent price surge)
|
| I guess a real threat to all historical code would be the
| end of open computing, and the requirement for any code run
| anywhere to be signed and censored by a megacorporation.
| Something we're getting worryingly close to. But in that
| world, most of today's blockchains will quickly die, too.
| [deleted]
| Taek wrote:
| Ethereum doesn't have a mechanism to run an operation
| periodically. If you want this game to step forward you need to
| make a new transaction and pay new fees.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Clearly the next step is to move NAO to the blockchain, so we can
| play nethack in the most immutable and verifiable way possible!
| (Congrats to OP. I find the project fascinating nonetheless :))
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