[HN Gopher] 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
___________________________________________________________________
1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
Author : nooks
Score : 249 points
Date : 2025-12-03 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (conwaylife.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (conwaylife.com)
| martianlantern wrote:
| Wow this seems very interesting! Can we get a TLDR of how this
| was achieved?
| adzm wrote:
| While I understand very little of it, it is still very
| enjoyable to read the details further in the thread at
| https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=222136#p22221...
|
| >>>
|
| Unidimensional spaceship can be interpreted as a demonstration
| of the progress of recent years in slow salvo technology and
| the various arms that use it.
|
| The project uses 4 construction arms, with the last three
| sharing principles with the arms used in the RCT15 project. The
| first arm is newly invented just for this case. I was not part
| of the community at the time the principles of the first two
| arms were studied, but let me describe them anyway.
|
| The one line restriction limit us to using blinkers as the
| basis of the first arm. Interestingly, a small perturbation at
| the end of some blinker configuration makes the pattern
| unstable, and several blinker patterns allow the perturbation
| "fuse" to move in a controlled manner. Various configurations
| have been discovered that leave no debris but move at different
| speeds. Some configurations have been found that produce
| backward-firing mwss (and leave debris), head-on collisions of
| mwss that transform them into gliders for both glider colors.
| By combining these configurations, we can trigger a fusion in
| the middle of a carefully chosen arrangement of blinkers that
| would synchronize the mwss collisions at the desired time
| parity at a prescribed x-coordinate and generate a glider with
| a prescribed phase and trajectory, so that such an arm could
| create any p2 recipe.
|
| The second arm used is a binary arm, where a pair of
| synchronized gliders on the same trajectories are used, with
| one glider always present and the presence of the other gliders
| allowing modification of the resulting configuration. Careful
| study of the results of various words using letters "1" and "2"
| (indicating the presence of the second glider) led to the
| discovery of specific modifications of the target "anchor"
| configuration.
|
| Some of them allow you to move the "head" of the anchor stack
| to move closer/farther from the base of the arm. Some sequences
| will generate a perpendicular glider. Not all mod 8 phases and
| colors are known, but with careful "head positioning" any p8
| recipe could be built with such an arm. The program used for
| the translation only used single blinker anchor technology,
| which produces a glider for a cost of around 100 bits
| ("letters"). The agnosticisation salvas of the p8 recipe to use
| only the p1/p2 constraints on the glider phases (when possible)
| greatly reduces the number of bits required. Alternative glider
| paths also help, leading to the same stable configurations
| during a slow salvas. Currently, there is an alternative method
| with around 80 bits per glider using 4 different anchors deep
| in the "arm target stack". The code could be improved by some
| form of dynamic programming by compiling the salvo from the
| parts emitting gliders closest to the arm to the gliders
| further away from the arm, but there was no need to complete
| the project.
|
| The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction
| arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is
| created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as
| instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider
| to emit.
|
| We have achieved an optimal encoding that requires about 7-8
| bits to emit a typical slow p2 salvo of gliders.
|
| The instruction set includes a move direction change option,
| move4 (repeated), move2, move1, color option, phase option.
| Stopping the move4 loop results in a glider being fired "near"
| the current arm position after a defined number of letters. The
| third arm uses exactly this set of options, while the fourth
| arm executes move1 after a change of direction, further
| increasing its efficiency. The fourth arm uses "yellow lane"
| filtering technology, which allows its components to be
| recycled, resulting in a more compact and less expensive
| design. On the contrary ecca1 is built as p1 pattern what
| allows selecting less expensive options during the build by the
| binary arm (at few places where p8 restriction would be
| required in ecca2 build). The arms are capable of firing
| gliders with 4 combinations of phase mode 8 and color (all four
| combinations of phase mode 2 and color). This is perfectly fine
| for slow salvos with a p2 restriction, but building p8 salvos
| requires limiting the salvos to use only a limited set of
| "signature" color combinations of glider phases.
|
| This led to a modification of the psamake program (transforming
| "neo" Spartan configurations for slow salvos that are built
| from a single block). When a bespoke subsalvo builds a p8
| pattern (initial call by a single glider), a 0 degree one time
| turner prefix is optionally allowed for a phase/color
| correction. Similarly, p2 salvos are transformed to the
| required p8 phases corresponding to the signature.
|
| There are several other prerequisites for building a ship. We
| should implement a storage where the bits to be fed into the
| binary arm and later into the ecca1 and ecca2 arms are encoded.
| Fortunately, a slow salvo of 8 gliders fired symmetrically into
| the central "spine" of the track from both sides (the ship
| cannot lose symmetry) will create 4 blocks near the spine if
| there was nothing there, or move the blinker from its given
| position by 2 pixels (east) emitting glider back.
|
| There are a few more requirements to build the ship. We should
| implement a storege of bits that will be fed into the binary
| arm and later into the ECCA1 and ECCA2 arms. Fortunately, a
| slow salvo of 8 gliders fired symmetrically into the central
| "spine" track from both sides (the ship cannot lose symmetry)
| will create 4 blocks near the spine if there is nothing there,
| or move the blinker from its current position by 2 pixels
| (east) emitting glider backward.
|
| The fuse arm fires 8 90 degree glider producing switch engines
| "GPSE90" that fire the slow salvo and convert the blinkers on
| the spine into a traveling signal.
|
| The signal is then fed into the binary arm by a pair of gliders
| firing the gliders back. One of the gliders is reflected so
| that they annihilate on impact. The glider signal from the tape
| annihilates the glider from one stream (negative signal), so
| the reflected glider from the other stream is not annihilated
| at the start of the arm. The ever-present glider of the binary
| arm is created by a gun of the corresponding period (repeated
| in the third and fourth arms).
|
| The fuse arm creates a reflector (p8bouncer) and a seed for a
| pair of corderships so that the first bit read triggers the
| corderships in synchronized phase to allow annihilation (and
| reflection).
|
| To trigger the fuse arm, we need a target for the arm gliders
| to be modified. This is what the pre-fuse does. It releases a
| glider, travels some distance, and releases a perpendicular
| lwss on collision course with the glider. The collision leaves
| behind debris (the target of the fuse arm) and launches two
| gliders into the spine. One of them hits its mirror image and
| creates a biblock, while the other triggers the fuse arm in the
| middle.
|
| We already know what the fuse arm does, the binary arm creates
| ecca1 and triggers a meteor shower creating a reflector on the
| input signal path. When the arm's anchor stack is removed,
| ecca1 starts interpreting the input bits. The goal of the ecca1
| arm is to clean up the west. It destroys the remnants of the
| dirty mwss creations and reconstructs the initial bliner
| configurations shifted 2 pixels to the east (we can't build
| anything on the spine due to symmetry, but we can modify the
| already presented content of the spine). It also creates ecca2,
| the hive needed to transition to the one-dimensional state and
| the ship needed at the end of the tape cleaning.
|
| Ecca1 finishes its work by destroying its reflector on the
| input signal path.
|
| Ecca2 is responsible for cleaning up the east. It is built with
| a destruction seed (computation supported by the gSoD program),
| which means that one incoming glider on the correct path will
| cause the pattern to disappear. The destruction seed generates
| two gliders. One of the goals of ecca2 is to create seeds of
| destruction of the reflectors on the input path - one
| destruction seed for the reflectors of ecca1 and one for the
| reflector, thus triggering the binary arm. The ship created by
| ecca1 near the spine converts a pair of cleaning mwss into a
| single glider, which triggers the destruction seed of ecca2.
| The exit gliders of ecca2 seed of destruction, are navigated by
| one time reflectors to the destruction seeds of the reflectors
| of ecca1 and the binary arm.
|
| Ecca2 converts ecca1 into a ship (a disposable turner), which
| would play its role at the very end of the ship's period (a
| slow destructive salvo combined with the trivial task of
| pslmake). (the rest of the blinker of the binary arm stack is
| also destroyed by ecca2).
|
| ECCA2 should also clean up the remains of the gun used by the
| binary arm (in the current version we stopped it with ecca1,
| but it would probably be equally or more efficient to stop it
| with ecca2) (slow 2 salvo is used there and half honey farm to
| honey farm slow salvo move collection helps a lot in such
| design).
|
| The most important task of ecca2 is to stop the tape reading
| mechanism and clean it up. The salvo of synchronized gliders
| stops the GPSE90 and the corderabsorbers are assembled in time
| to stop the cordership pair (as a tool a program was used that
| automatically combines a pre-calculated splitters and
| reflectors (consisting of at most two small objects) to create
| a given pair of synchronized parallel gliders). The glider
| streams fired from the corderships do not stop at the same
| time, so the 3 escaping gliders are also stopped by the seed
| created by ecca2. In order for ecca2 to create a seed to stop
| the GPSE90, it must clean up the irregularities of the GPSE90's
| trajectory debris. (destructive salvo calculated into a
| periodic pattern...). Similarly, the far-end cleanup converts
| the debris of the stalled GPSE90 into a periodic pattern. Ecca2
| must send corderfleets cleaning a periodic pattern (of
| arbitrary length). Therefore, it must create corderabsorbers on
| the other side (we chose corderabsorbers close, ships
| travelling from far). (used a program to search for
| corderfleets cleaning compatible periodic patterns) ... the
| corderships were created using modern 11 cluster seeds (except
| for the one closest to the arm, where 12 cluster seeds were
| used to fit close to the arm)).
|
| The corderfleet was also used to destroy the remnants of a pair
| of corderships. The last task of ecca2 was to fire a salvo to
| create two mwss that would clean the blocks created during the
| tape reading (this would trigger a seed of ecca2 destroyal at
| the end).
|
| The corderabsorber for the last cordership is modified and
| instead of annihilating with the cordership it emits a
| perpendicular glider that hits the boat from the ECCA1
| conversion to bounce to the behive and converts it into a one-
| dimensional pattern, starting a new generation.
|
| The ECCA2 compiler used agnosticised lane phase recipes and
| chose the optimal route from the options (shortening the tape
| as much as possible). This optimization was not done in ECCA1,
| binary or fuse arm.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| If the first Star Trek episodes were written today, they
| could have very well used GoL terminology as technobabble.
| The depth of the GoL community lingo always amazes me, as an
| outsider
| eig wrote:
| Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love
| to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| My understanding (which could be wildly wrong, I only skimmed
| the thread) is that it's running in a standard 2-dimensional
| Game of Life grid, it just happens to start out as a 1x3.7B
| cell line.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Pretty sure the GOL grid has more than one of those lines...
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| After the first step it isn't 1D any more, so I don't think
| that visualization is possible
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's possible. It'd just be a 3D visualization and more
| importantly, stupendously huge. If each cell was a cubic
| millimeter, the shape would be 3700km wide, and stretch 1/3rd
| of the way to the moon.
| nomel wrote:
| I'm having trouble finding a common image file format that
| has > 32bit resolution fields, fit it in.
| ethmarks wrote:
| And if each cell was a cubic micrometer (which is a side
| length 200-300 times smaller than a pixel on a typical
| screen and 50-100 times thinner than a human hair), it'd
| still stretch 3.7 kilometers, which is about the length of
| a commercial airport runway.
| creatonez wrote:
| The best way to run it is in the software Golly. It has the
| HashLife algorithm needed to make it run fast enough to see it
| finish.
| adzm wrote:
| Notably it only fits within a 1 cell high bounding box during at
| least one of its phases, not all.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| I'm not a GoLtician myself but I don't think that would be
| possible under the "standard" rules anyway, except the trivial
| case of stasis/death.
|
| I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and
| work it belies. Congrats to those involved!
| pohl wrote:
| Why do you think it would not be possible?
| smallerize wrote:
| To make a new cell "live" it must be neighbored by three
| live cells. And in 2d, a cell only has two neighbors.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| s/2d/1d/ right?
| smallerize wrote:
| Oh, right.
| pohl wrote:
| I see what you're saying, but I think it's a
| misunderstanding. 1D here only means that there's some
| state where the active cells are confined to one row --
| but one row within the ordinary 2D GoL plane. I'm sure
| the next iteration leaps off the line immediately. Search
| for "Blinker" here to imagine how it could start
| spreading off the line.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The GP understood that.
| smallerize wrote:
| Right, but that's not what adzm was asking about.
| gdevillers wrote:
| What are the rules in 1d ?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It only starts out 1-dimensionally, it continues to evolve on a
| standard GoL grid.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| Then, importantly, it collapses itself back down to a
| 1-dimensional copy of its starting representation, but
| translated.
| boothby wrote:
| Specifically, after 133_076_755_768 steps, the
| 1-dimensional pattern reoccurs translated by two pixels. On
| skimming the thread I haven't determined if that shift is
| parallel or perpendicular to the line.
| josh11b wrote:
| I think it has to be parallel by symmetry.
| postalrat wrote:
| Can it leave other bits behind after it moves?
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| By definition of a pure spaceship / glider, no it can't.
| If it emits persistent "exhaust" that's a "smoking
| ship"[0].
|
| [0] https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Types_of_spaceships#Smoki
| ng_ship
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Hah, and a forum bug further down in the thread:
|
| > _Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a
| post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes._
| pkilgore wrote:
| So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and
| eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B
| cells long line?
|
| That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of
| abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.
|
| Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction
| level!
| layer8 wrote:
| See here:
| https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start...
|
| It's also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells
| is less than a hundredth of the line's extent:
| https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1
| dkural wrote:
| Only about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The
| human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.
| levocardia wrote:
| Game of life indeed!
| H8crilA wrote:
| _> Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1,
| 2025._
|
| Almost 10 years of development.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Development, idle hacking when someone got bored at work;
| potato, potahto...
| tantalor wrote:
| How many steps is the period? How far does it travel in that
| period? What direction does it go? Does it clean up after
| itself?
| layer8 wrote:
| As the wiki page states, the period is 133076755768, and it
| moves by two cells in that time. Spaceships in GoL by
| definition don't leave anything behind, they produce the
| exact same configuration, just shifted across the grid.
|
| Given that it starts as a single line, it is symmetric in
| the axis implied by that line, and hence can't possibly
| move diagonally or orthogonal to the line. Hence it moves
| in the direction of the line.
| tantalor wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I was a bit confused by that wiki page because it says
| "Direction Orthogonal" but like you said that can't be.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, "orthogonal" here just means "not diagonal". Since
| GoL configurations don't have a distinguished orientation
| (you can rotate and/or mirror them however you like), it
| wouldn't make sense to specify up/down/left/right, at
| least not without first fixing an (arbitrary)
| orientation.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I'm barely able to follow, but this part was fun:
|
| > The third and fourth arms are extreme compression
| construction arms "ecca", where a programming language
| interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are
| interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2)
| and line of glider to emit.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.
| cpfohl wrote:
| Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends
| as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures
| in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by
| repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of
| life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia
| articles:
|
| Conway's game of life:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
|
| Gliders:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Thank you ^_^
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| spaceship*
|
| glider is one specific spaceship, but name for moving
| patterns is _spaceship_
| zahlman wrote:
| As noted by others, the title is mistaken; this is a
| spaceship, not a glider. (As explained in the Wikipedia
| article, "glider" refers to a specific 5-cell pattern
| discovered very early on.)
|
| > So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box
| 3707300605x1 is here
|
| My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in
| (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to
| repeat).
| bezko wrote:
| "History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes" - Mark Twain
|
| Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have
| people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like
| it's 1972 again.
| munchler wrote:
| Off-topic, but like a lot of quotes attributed to Twain,
| there's no evidence he said that.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
| btilly wrote:
| As Mark Twain also said, _" A lie can travel halfway around
| the world before the truth can get its boots on."_
|
| Of course he didn't say that one either:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
| IAmBroom wrote:
| But he did call Mae West "my little chickadee", right?
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don't quite understand what
| exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more...
|
| The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the
| direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits
| size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane
| program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just
| guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary portion,
| but it would be hardly seen in the ship size.
|
| > Using agnosticized recipe in the fuse portion would definitely
| reduce its size. Better cordership seed and better salvo for
| gpse90 would help...
|
| Dear lord I had no idea there's this much jargon in the game of
| life community. Gonna be reading the wiki for hours
| falcor84 wrote:
| Their free book "Conway's Game of Life: Mathematics and
| Construction" is a great starting point -
| https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always
| astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive
| amounts of time and brain power to this.
| tombert wrote:
| I think it appeals to the same itch that languages like
| Brainfuck scratch.
|
| There's something exceedingly interesting about how you can
| model complexity with something extremely simple. Brainfuck
| is fun because it forces you to think _extremely_ low level,
| because ultimately it is basically just a raw implementation
| of a Turing machine. I wouldn 't want to write a big program
| in it, but it is fun to think about _how_ you might express a
| complicated algorithm with it.
|
| Similarly with CGOL, it is really interesting to see how far
| you can stretch really simple rules into something really
| complex.
|
| I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that
| I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not
| _completely_ trivial but it 's simple enough to not be
| frustrating, and I completely understand why
| math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate
| brain power to.
| __del__ wrote:
| for those who think brainfuck is too pedestrian, have a
| browse through the esolang wiki:
|
| https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list
| DesiLurker wrote:
| if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by
| something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is
| trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph
| update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet
| but very interesting.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Wolfram is kind of obsessed with cellular automata, even
| went and wrote a whole book about them titled "A New Kind
| of Science". The reception to it was a bit mixed. CA are
| Turing-complete, so yeah, you can compute anything with
| them, I'm just not sure that in itself leads to any greater
| Revealed Truths. Does make for some fun visualizations
| though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The question really ultimately resolves to whether the
| universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is
| analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with
| god, because I would see that as proof of all of this
| being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being
| makes me hope that it is analog.
| azeirah wrote:
| A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read
| the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when
| I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch.
|
| It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand
| pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points:
|
| - "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not
| my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to
| complexity when iterated upon - The invention of field of
| computation is as big and important of an invention as
| the field of mathematics
|
| The last one is less explicit, but it's what I took away
| from it. Computation is of course part of mathematics,
| but it is a kind of "live" mathematics. Executable
| mathematics.
|
| Super cool book and absolutely worth reading if you're
| into this kind of thing.
| culi wrote:
| That's because it's not "game of life jargon", it's "cellular
| automata" jargon. Which is a field of math and comes along with
| a bunch of math jargon from related fields.
| dooglius wrote:
| I searched several of these terms and they are all
| specifically jargon of game of life enthusiasts, (i.e. search
| reaults are all on fansites related to game of life) not
| general cellular automata jargon.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I assume there's fanfic shipping of automata...
|
| (If you don't recognize that use of "shipping", don't
| google it at work.)
| pepinator wrote:
| mmmh I don't think so. I've read several papers on cellular
| automata and I don't recognize the terms
| wrs wrote:
| Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to
| experience what it's like for my spouse to listen to my work
| conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| More or less like this?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJk4y9NGvE
| johanvts wrote:
| It's technobabble https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w
| tomcam wrote:
| However much karma this comment scored, it's underrated
| IAmBroom wrote:
| One exception: You are actually enthused about the topic you
| don't understand.
|
| Your SO is likely only enthused to the degree that it affects
| your mood. "So this RISC architecture isn't compliant with
| ADA-1056 after all? And you were right all along? Wow, that's
| great, honey!"
| dcel wrote:
| Sometimes I feel a deep sense of loss of the old web that grew up
| with -full of niche interests, unashamedly earnest and rich in
| subcultures- has been lost in a sea of corporate slop and
| clickbait social media.
|
| Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels
| like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C
| programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated
| by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a
| depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do
| you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL
| lurking out there all these years.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This seems like a great task as a test for AI.
|
| The result is easily verify-able, yet the techniques to design
| such a glider are very complex and some might not have been
| discovered yet.
| culi wrote:
| It's already being done. Has been done for decades now.
| Definitely wouldn't be a good use of an LLM-type model if
| that's what you're proposing
|
| If you look at the placement of Journal of Cellular Automata in
| SciMago's Shape of Science visualization[0] you'll see that
| it's completely surrounded by machine learning/AI journals
|
| [0] https://www.scimagojr.com/shapeofscience/
| btilly wrote:
| You can change "might not" to "have not".
|
| The Game of Life is Turing complete. And therefore a complete
| analysis of how to write programs in it would imply a solution
| to the Halting problem. Which is impossible.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Turing completeness relies on infinite state.
|
| With finite state, one could theoretically brute force search
| every possible 1D sequence to find a glider shorter than the
| one discovered here.
|
| Obviously that's impractical, but turns the whole thing into
| a search problem - find the best/a good solution in a huge
| search space.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| 1D spaceship*
|
| glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is
| _spaceship_
| rtkwe wrote:
| Their own wiki points out they're sometimes used
| interchangably.
|
| https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I love it that there are people obsessed enough to spend their
| time on this and our society can support it.
| Dwedit wrote:
| RIP John Conway, a victim of Covid.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Two of the most fascinating open questions about the Game of Life
| are in my opinion:
|
| 1. What is the behavior of Conway's Game of Life when the initial
| position is random? Paraphrasing Boris Bukh's comment on the post
| linked below, the Game of Life supports self-replication and is
| Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily
| intelligent programs. So, will a random initial position (tend
| to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the
| chaos reign?
|
| There exist uncountably infinitely many particular initial
| configurations out of which a random one may be drawn, which
| makes this more difficult (a particular infinite grid
| configuration can be represented as the binary digits (fractional
| part) of a real number, spiraling outwards from a given center
| coordinate cell: 0.0000... represents an empty infinite grid,
| 0.1111... a fully alive infinite grid).
|
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132402/conways-game-of-li...
|
| 2. Relatedly, does a superstable configuration exist? One that
| continues to exist despite any possible external interference
| pattern on its border? Perhaps even an expanding one?
|
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132687/is-there-any-super...
| Legend2440 wrote:
| One problem is that, even though it is turing-complete, many
| practical operations are very difficult. Patterns tend towards
| chaos and they tend towards fading out, which are not good
| properties for useful computation. Simply moving information
| from one part of the grid to another requires complex
| structures like spaceships.
|
| You might have better luck with other variants. Reversible
| cellular automata have a sort of 'conservation of mass' where
| cells act more like particles. Continuous cellular automata
| (like Lenia) have less chaotic behavior. Neural cellular
| automata can be trained with gradient descent.
| Someone wrote:
| > the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-
| complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent
| programs.
|
| I think people will disagree about whether "Turing-complete" is
| powerful enough for supporting intelligence but let's assume it
| does.
|
| > So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with
| super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?
|
| Even if it doesn't, it might take only one intelligent life
| form for the space to (eventually) get filled with it (the game
| of life doesn't heave energy constraints that make it hard to
| travel over long distances, so I don't see a reason why it
| wouldn't. On the other hand, maybe my assumption that all
| intelligent life would want to expand is wrong), and in an
| infinite plane, it's likely (?certain?) one will exist.
|
| On the other hand it's likely more than one exists, and they
| might be able to exterminate each other.
| jmsgwd wrote:
| Your first question is discussed in the book The Recursive
| Universe by William Poundstone (1984).
|
| One of the chapters asks "what is life?". It considers (and
| rejects) various options, and finally settles upon a definition
| based on Von Neumann-style self-replicating machines using
| blueprints and universal constructors, and explains why this is
| the most (only?) meaningful definition of life.
|
| Later, it talks about how one would go about creating such a
| machine in Conway's Game of Life. When the book was written in
| 1984, no one had actually created one (they need to be very
| large, and computers weren't really powerful enough then). But
| in 2010 Andrew J. Wade created Gemini, the first successful
| self-replicating machine in GoL, which I believe meets the
| criteria - and hence is "alive" according to that definition
| (but only in the sense that, say, a simple bacteria is alive).
| And I think it works somewhat like how it was sketched out in
| the book.
|
| Another chapter estimated how big (and how densely populated) a
| randomly-initialized hypothetical GoL universe would need to be
| in order for "life" (as defined earlier) to appear by chance. I
| don't recall the details - but the answer was mind-boggling
| big, and also very sparsely populated.
|
| All that only gives you life though, not intelligence. But life
| (by this definition) has the potential to evolve through a
| process of natural selection to achieve higher levels of
| complexity and eventually intelligence, at least in theory.
| wffurr wrote:
| Anyone have a recording of what this thing looks like? I'm very
| curious to see it and didn't see any obvious links in the thread.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| My understanding is that, it is so large and takes so long to
| run, there is really no way to visualize it
| IAmBroom wrote:
| There is of course a way to visualize it, but it would be
| more boring than a Tommy Wiseau film... with a less
| reasonable plot.
| pugworthy wrote:
| How in the world do people even discover these things? Certainly
| not by clicking cells to set up an initial population then hit
| "Go". Brute force approach works I suppose.
| zkmon wrote:
| In 1995, I received an email from someone named Conway asking me
| for more details about some silly thing I wrote in sci.math
| usenet group. Later I came to know more abut him as John Conway.
| Sadly I lost access to those emails.
|
| Now, I'm unaware of this strange GoL world with amazing work
| people are doing. Sometimes I wonder which frontiers of progress,
| should we as human race be utilizing this amazing creative
| potential of the current generations.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| makes me wonder if its possible to get natural numbers like pi/e
| using a geometric structure in GoL. it would be interesting to
| derive them from an emerging order based on fixed set of automata
| rules. If possible it might lead credence to simulated universe
| hypothesis.
| terlisimo wrote:
| well...
|
| 1) GoL is turing complete
|
| 2) there are algorithms that calculate digits of Pi or e.
|
| so... yes?
|
| but if I just took any old Pi-digits algorithm and encoded it
| on GoL, its appearance would not be meaningful or "elegant" to
| our senses. You're probably asking "what does the shortest/most
| elegant program to calculate Pi in GoL look like, and does it
| maybe have some unexpected relation to other mathematical terms
| like, I dunno, Euler's identity or... Mandelbrot set?" And then
| you would probably need to answer the question "Well, how would
| you like the digits encoded and represented?".
|
| All of a sudden your question becomes a bit ambiguous. Or did I
| misunderstand what you meant?
|
| I mean.... I think I feel what you're asking, like... is there
| some primal version of Pi that can be encoded in GoL initial
| condition with as few bits as possible but I'm afraid that the
| answer is something like "well, that depends on what you mean
| by [...]"
| nilslindemann wrote:
| I would like to see a video.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Since the video screen would be larger than 1 Bpxl wide, I
| would accept a FHD scaled-out video.
| avhon1 wrote:
| If each step was 1 frame, and the video played at 240 frames
| per second, the video would last about 17.5 years
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Can someone who knows a bit more about this help me understand
| how structures like this are produced? Is there some kind of
| computer search, perhaps guided? Is this a clever combination of
| sub-structures, timing mechanisms, etc. that are then fit
| together like Legos?
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever
| search algorithms. There's also the approach of running
| trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for
| interesting patterns. These small patterns are then pieced
| together to build the larger structures.
| jacquesm wrote:
| How on earth did they find this? It's akin to creating a genome
| out of thin air and expecting a living creature to pop out at the
| other end.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-03 23:00 UTC)