[HN Gopher] A colorful Game of Life
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A colorful Game of Life
Author : azhenley
Score : 116 points
Date : 2025-02-06 12:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com)
| rezmason wrote:
| HN is on fire today with visual spectacle.
|
| OP will you describe how color propagates through these?
| Isamu wrote:
| Yes, the update rules please.
| nrobinaubertin wrote:
| The code is here:
| https://colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com/index.js
|
| The hue of each cell is computed as an average of the
| surrounding cells hues with some randomness added. Search for
| `hueverage` in the code
| biohcacker84 wrote:
| Yesterday I was playing with Copilot, asking it to write a python
| implementation of the game of life. Something I did a long time
| and it took me about an hour.
|
| The first several attempts it would delete it and say identical
| to public code. Until I finally asked it to make a unique
| implementation that's not public code.
|
| It took about a minute.
| deadbabe wrote:
| A human can literally write a game of life in one line of
| Python using some clever comprehensions and lambdas. It's not
| that impressive. The point of the game is simple rules create
| surprising emergent behaviors.
| noduerme wrote:
| And the point of LLMs is that simple NNs finally show
| emergent behaviors if you throw a billion times more
| processing power at them. So it took a megawatt of
| electricity to write a longer than human version of game of
| life. We should be impressed. /s
|
| I'm actually not sure though whether it's more impressive to
| willfully attempt to not think hard about a problem, while
| thinking really hard about how to get something else to solve
| that problem for you. That may actually be a completely
| different order of thinking, and its value might be judged on
| whether such tools are always available from now on. In other
| words, we could just be arguing that if it wasn't written in
| Assembly it doesn't show real understanding... when such
| things have become apparently irrelevant.
| Arch485 wrote:
| > willfully attempt to not think hard about a problem,
| while thinking really hard about how to get something else
| to solve that problem for you.
|
| I think this is management in a nutshell
| deadbabe wrote:
| Emergent behavior tends to be more interesting to
| programmers than users.
|
| Consider game AI. You could make really complex AI with
| neural networks and such, but most of the time it adds
| nothing to the game and the user can't even tell the
| difference from classically programmed AI. The devs
| probably think it's super cool though.
|
| This is how it will be for other stuff. People are
| impressed with some no-code travel agent AI powered by LLMs
| but with some thought you could pretty much make the same
| thing with scripting and it works predictably 100% of the
| time and utilizing far less power and compute.
|
| If entire humans can be replaced by simple programs, the
| logic dictates AI can also be replaced by simple programs
| even if the AI functions at human level intelligence. I
| fail to see a compelling business case for AI.
| noduerme wrote:
| Lovely implementation! The slow fading is a really nice touch.
| akkartik wrote:
| A year ago I made a version I call "Chromacline". Multiple
| populations of different colors duke it out. My implementation
| runs it on computers and phones without needing a browser.
|
| https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Wild. I have never seen triangular Life.
| hirokio123 wrote:
| Just by making it colorful, it really looks moldy--like red,
| yellow, blue, and green mold.
| akomtu wrote:
| A more entertaining would be a game of real life:
|
| T' = -c, a citizen in this game of life has an amount of life T
| that evaporates at a more or less constant pace, and
|
| T' = gT, the amount of life T grows exponentially by absorbing
| life from its neighbors with a force proportional to its greed g
| and its already accumulated weight T.
| SynnVoid wrote:
| Nice color propagation! I enjoyed the different base shapes
| (triangle, hexagon, etc.). I had experimented with the hexagonal
| version in Three.js here: https://onivers.com/hexalife/ tweaking
| the rules to explore interesting patterns.
| dvh wrote:
| If you like game of life watch "backwards game of life" video by
| Alpha Phoenix, definitely my favorite video of 2024:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY
| import wrote:
| This as a screensaver would be really nice. Great work!
| brap wrote:
| One of these days we'll have real consciousness built purely in
| GoL
| yapyap wrote:
| uhuh, and then Terry will rise from the death to make TempleOS
| work on the playstation 5
| belinder wrote:
| I like how rendering positioning gives the illusion of there
| being more shape types than there really are, as the three
| triangles are the same and circle and hexagon are the same. I'm
| sure it's been done before but I've never seen it, so nice job
| zuminator wrote:
| Am I correct in assuming this is basically a skin on top of
| standard Conway Life rules?
| kanavs wrote:
| This is incredibly cool! If you are looking for something to do
| next, try replicating the following quantum game of life and may
| be try different rules with quantum mechnanics:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.4666
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(page generated 2025-02-08 23:01 UTC)