[HN Gopher] Particle Life
___________________________________________________________________
Particle Life
Author : hyperific
Score : 146 points
Date : 2023-12-28 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| billytetrud wrote:
| This is fascinating. It's like a more complex game of life than
| John connoway's. It's crazy that little creatures seem to form at
| such small scales easily with these parameters. It's almost like
| the parameters of our real universe intentionally made it
| difficult to form life, rather than easy as some people seem to
| think.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| They are less creatures than molecules. Now, mind you, as some
| complex sets of rules approach steady state I can pretend they
| are far-flung stellar empires with colors ascribed to each type
| of system of government (and have).
|
| What is fooling you is the motion. This is sustained because
| the system has no conservation principles built in. You can
| make A-B pairs where B is attracted to A, A is repelled by B,
| and off they go, zoom. Were the meta-rules devised such that
| conservation of energy or momentum and such were baked in to
| whatever system you devised, you would see less exciting
| structures which would more resemble a late-stage pentamino
| explosion in the Game of Life.
|
| With a sufficiently large processor, I would like to see this
| in three dimensions and more options for force, such as
| dropping off as the inverse of r or r-cubed or even r * log(r),
| or some "repulsive at a distance, attractive at very close
| quarters" particles. I have a feeling that such a system would
| grind to a halt even with clever optimizations.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Ah that's interesting, I can see how that would result in a
| lot more dynamic behavior.
| dustingetz wrote:
| need analog computer for that :)
| squigz wrote:
| There's no reason to believe life is particularly rare in the
| universe either, though.
| billytetrud wrote:
| There are, in fact, reasons to believe that. Nothing
| definitive of course. But the fact that we haven't been
| absorbed by a von neumann swarm or something like it places
| strict limits on the prevalence of life and/or what stages
| that life can achieve. One would either have to belive that
| intelligent life is vastly less likely than non-intelligent
| life, or that life itself is quite rare, or that life simply
| hasn't been around for much longer than life on earth.
| squigz wrote:
| I don't see not being eaten by a swarm of machines as
| evidence of anything - but it is interesting to me that
| you'd qualify all this with "or what stages that life can
| achieve". So simple life could be extraordinarily
| commonplace, and considering the context of this post...
| billytetrud wrote:
| It is a fact that we haven't been eaten by a swarm of
| anything. Facts are evidence. If you don't understand
| that, I don't think we'll be having a productive or fun
| converstion. Sound more like you're interested in making
| innane snarky comments to fuel your own ego. Good luck
| with that.
| squigz wrote:
| Would you like to actually address the point I made about
| simple life?
| billytetrud wrote:
| If you made a point about that, it was not clear to me.
| Perhaps you were implying that simple life could be very
| common even if intelligent life isn't. While yes, that is
| a possibility, that says nothing of its probability. Were
| that the circumstance, it leaves the question open as to
| why simple life would be common but intelligent life not
| common.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > One would either have to belive that intelligent life is
| vastly less likely than non-intelligent life
|
| That seems like a valid belief. Getting to a technological
| stage such that a species would be detectable over the vast
| distances of space could indeed be quite rare. You have to
| also consider the temporal aspect: intelligent,
| technologically advanced species may have evolved several
| times but gone extinct before we could notice them. Do
| other technically advanced species exist in the universe?
| Probably, but it could be that at any given time there
| might only be about 1 in any given galaxy and the distances
| between galaxies are great enough that we'd never likely be
| able to make contact. (and ~1 per galaxy would still mean
| that there would be a whole lot of intelligent species out
| there - it's just that it would be extremely difficult to
| make contact with any of them)
| billytetrud wrote:
| > That seems like a valid belief.
|
| Its not at all clear in general. It _might_ be true. But
| it also might not. It seems quite reasonable to believe
| that life inevitably evolves into intelligent life if
| given enough time. Why some life would and some life
| wouldn 't isn't at all clear.
|
| > advanced species may have evolved several times but
| gone extinct before we could notice them.
|
| All the potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, for sure.
| But it would almost definitely have to be species that
| never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar
| systems" phase.
|
| > at any given time there's only about 1
|
| This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1. If it got
| to earth at any time in the last billion years, we might
| have a pretty high chance of discovering it if it existed
| on earth for any significant legnth of time.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > But it would almost definitely have to be species that
| never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar
| systems" phase.
|
| It's certainly not a given that our species will ever do
| that or that we'll last long enough to do that.
|
| > This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1.
|
| Let's say we're the 1 currently in the milky way galaxy.
| There could be another in the closest galaxy the Canis
| Major Dwarf Galaxy which is 25,000 light years away. But
| being able to detect a signal from 25,000 light years
| away... well, that's the problem. And what if they're
| just getting to the point where they could transmit a
| signal now? So maybe in 25,000 years we'd notice
| _something_... maybe? (if we 're still around) As far as
| physically traveling 25,000 ly, well we know that even
| trying to go 1 ly is going to be super difficult
| technically. Similar problems even if there's an
| intelligent species on the other side of our own galaxy
| since it's 52K ly across.
| aacid wrote:
| I honestly believe that high intelligence while short term
| is extremely advantageous, long term it is self-
| destructive.
|
| I like to imagine there are countless planets with perfect
| ecosystems of living organisms where no single species
| dominates whole planet.
| billytetrud wrote:
| I'm curious what makes you think that. That is, of
| course, one of the general solutions put forth to the
| fermi paradox. Ie either the species develops species
| killing weapons (like nukes) or individuals gain
| massively destructive weapons. But I find these things
| unlikely. Even exploding all of our existing nukes in the
| most devastating locations would not destroy humanity or
| the earth. We'd bounce back - tho if such an event is
| inevitable, perhaps we would ride an endless wax and wane
| between devastating destruction events every 1000 years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is no such thing as a perfect ecosystem because we
| live in an imperfect universe, this is if you look at any
| significant timescale. Eventually you're going to get hit
| by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst, or some mega volcano
| is going to pop and cause world wide levels of
| destruction. And generally we see some reestablishment
| species is going to dominate for some time.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| There is no evidence that space travel is practical or
| sustainable. The only viable spaceship known to man is
| Earth, and we don't steer it.
|
| Maybe there are lots of earth-like planets with intelligent
| beings, but travel is impossible and communication is
| useless given the time delay.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Saying there is "no evidence" is factually absurd. There
| are a whole host of possibilities for practical long
| distance space travel. At very least for small light-
| weight robots. And it even seems possible that we can
| viably transport our entire solarsystem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU . No evidence
| indeed... only if you lack imagination.
| nox100 wrote:
| It's not hard to believe that we could make self
| replicating drones in the next 100 years that go from
| system to system, make a few more, and continue. We've
| already sent drones out of our solar system. They don't
| have to go fast. They'd still visit every system in the
| known universe in a "relatively" small amount of time.
| (relative to the age of the known universe).
| dekhn wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to say that we could probably
| build a fleet of ships containing tardigrades in their
| dried-out tun state (which is biologically inert, up to
| tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and extremely
| resilient to radiation and vacuum), launch them with
| enough mass to reach a nearby (up to 10 LY at 0.001c?)
| solar system with a planet that has water, and deliver
| the payload to the water, such that the tardigrades would
| revert to their normal living state.
|
| It would cost a lot of money. It would take a very long
| time (hundreds of thousands of years). Nobody alive today
| would see the results. There are any number of systematic
| and non-systematic failures that could occur. building
| things that work autonomously for 100Kyears is
| nontrivial. Even if you succeeded- say, 100Kyears from
| now, one out of a thousand of your samples crash-lands
| onto a remote planet and revives- congratulations, you've
| maybe just contaminated an otherwise unknown ecosystem.
|
| The story gets more interesting if earth has fusion,
| stable government and research funding, then you could
| make humans into tuns that can travel for 10K years, and
| have advanced propulsion (.01-.1c), pre-deliver full
| infrastructure...
| SkyBelow wrote:
| There are a number of possibilities, which depends upon
| what methods of interaction we are looking at.
|
| For example, with direct contact, we can estimate a
| probability of life along side how possible space travel
| is. Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all and so
| there is plenty of life, but it is mostly stuck to its
| solar systems and maybe a few neighboring stars. Overall,
| given that we can send and receive signals much easier than
| we can send and receive space crafts, I think this isn't as
| useful a metric.
|
| The better one is that we don't see signals from other life
| elsewhere, but this still has to be measured by how likely
| life elsewhere would be able to see our signals.
|
| Lastly, there is the matter of what it means to be rare.
| Say only 2 or 3 planets in a given galaxy end up developing
| intelligent life, is that rare? Given the number of
| galaxies in the visible universe, that is hundreds of
| billions if not trillions of planets with intelligent life.
| Yet with only 2 or 3 in a galaxy, it would be easy for us
| to not see any signs because maybe we are the only ones in
| our galaxy or our galactic neighbors are on the other side
| of the milky way and we have no technology to communicate,
| nor will we for the near future. Hundreds of billions of
| intelligent species can be considered both rare and not
| rare given the sorts of scales we are talking about.
|
| Also other edge cases, like maybe intelligent life is
| common enough but it tends to rarely progress past a
| certain point of development due to wiping itself out.
| Personally, every explanation I've heard or can think of
| has some sort of unpleasantness to it, much like the quote
| that says either we are alone or we aren't alone, and both
| ideas are scary in their own ways.
| hsnewman wrote:
| This shows how life is emergent from simple rules.
| downboots wrote:
| how does it show it? what is meant by life? are rules necessary
| or just transitions? what enables rules at all?
| hyperific wrote:
| Physical and chemical properties of organic molecules give
| rise to emergent life-like structures/patterns. Molecules
| interacting via hydrogen bonding, solubility, hydrophobicity
| and hydrophilicity - repulsion and attraction - can produce
| protomembranes under the right conditions.
|
| In this demonstration, particles with certain rules can
| interact in such a way that self-organizing structures
| emerge.
| matt-attack wrote:
| A general question by those that support ideas like
| Intelligent Design seem to focus on the notion of order from
| randomness. Specifically the natural intuition is that the
| vast amount of order associated with life could never arise
| on its own from just randomness. It's encouraging to be able
| to so quickly demonstrate that in fact order can emerge from
| chaos. Even if the organelles or molecules or whatever you
| might consider them in these simulations don't map
| specifically to organelles or molecules or cells in our
| world, the general concept is important to understand.
| downboots wrote:
| where do the rules come from? Is it randomness all the way
| down? how come they run at all? how can a lifeform in a
| dynamic mess of jiggling things have a claim to
| understanding?
| smusamashah wrote:
| None of these simulated systems show replication evolving out
| of random rules though.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Life, uh, finds its particles.
| FpUser wrote:
| Really liked it
| theophrastus wrote:
| Well done: 3d is an option! Always wondered what emergent
| properties result from simple rules worlds when the
| dimensionality goes from 2d to 3d.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| This is a much more complete implementation, but I took a crack
| at this a while ago using compute shaders in Godot 4, if that's
| interesting to folks!
|
| https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders
| beders wrote:
| It is amazing how easily self-sustaining structures emerge from
| such simple rules. Mesmerizing.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is there any "sustaining" in the simulation? Is death a
| possibility? If not, then there is no "sustaining".
| spacecadet wrote:
| Super cool! Earlier this year I created a zero-player simulation
| using pygame and several AI coding assitants to see how capable
| they might be. In the end I had to clean up alot, but Im happy
| with how it turned out.
|
| https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft
| bloopernova wrote:
| offtopic: I got a new PC for xmas, and hadn't really stress
| tested it to make sure the fan management curve was correct.
| Running the linked site's demos made the fans work and they're
| really responsive. Cool stuff!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Particle Life Emerges from Simplicity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156592 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Particle Life Simulation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680845 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Particle Life_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21875720
| - Dec 2019 (7 comments)
| airesearcher wrote:
| This is so great!!! Nice work!
| pbowyer wrote:
| This is the most interesting one I generated:
| https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-life/particle_life.html...
|
| It eventually settles down to one large and unstable blob and
| another stable. Neither move so that's it. But before that it did
| what I had expected to see with objects meeting and merging
| deadbabe wrote:
| I'm not really understanding what the "life" part of this is.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Indeed. If we described this as a "neat circular patterns
| simulator" would anything be lost?
|
| Is there reproduction? Is there evolution? Is there death? It
| appears not. Those are essential to life.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I suspect it is called life because some of the observed
| patterns looks a lil bit like something you would see while
| peering at a petri dish on a microscope (if you squint? :-).
| Perhaps it is implied that with the right rules you would be
| able to generate "the real thing".
| superb-owl wrote:
| I'd love to see this on a toroidal surface
| justinl33 wrote:
| a Mobius strip, even
| sockaddr wrote:
| Fascinating. This reminds me of nanopond
| chuckadams wrote:
| Looking at the 3d js version right now. This might be my most
| favorite thing since the original Conway's life or maybe the old
| Primordial Life screen saver from the 90's. Have you considered
| adding shader support? I'd love to see a slowed-down more
| "blobby" version running full-screen. Probably turn my mac into a
| space heater too, but right now that's a bonus ;)
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| What are the philosophical implications of these life models? Is
| it implied that life as we know it may also have a simple set of
| rules like this that generated it? Or is it just a game? (as in
| Conway's GoL).
|
| Found some info here, seems like these are open questions [1].
|
| --
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life#Philosophy
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-28 23:00 UTC)