[HN Gopher] Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reprod...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reproduction of
       Computational Life
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2026-03-08 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ajs1998 wrote:
       | Awesome. I've been meaning to play around with this more after
       | first hearing about this paper. I tried a similar automata with
       | an even simpler representation for turing machines and there
       | wasn't an abiogenesis moment. I guess the many no-op characters
       | in the original paper allow for it to explore a bigger space of
       | valid programs or to hide data without completely overwriting
       | itself.
       | 
       | I would like to try alternative character encodings, including
       | ones with fewer no-ops where most bytes are valid BF characters.
       | Are more no-ops better? Is self replicating goo the best we can
       | do?
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | I've done a lot of experimentation around brainfuck, this
         | paper's specific variant, and applications to genetic
         | programming.
         | 
         | My conclusions so far regarding the abiogenesis/self-replicator
         | angle is that it is _very_ interesting, but it is impossible to
         | control or guide in any practical way. I really enjoy building
         | and watching these experiments, but they don 't ever go
         | anywhere useful. A machine that can edit its own program tape
         | during execution (which is then persisted) is extremely
         | volatile in terms of fitness landscape over time.
         | 
         | If you are looking for practical applications of BF to real
         | world problems, I would suggest evolving fixed sized program
         | modules that are executed over shared memory in a sequential
         | fashion. Assume the problem + instruction set says that you
         | must find a ~1000 instruction program. With standard BF, the
         | search space is one gigantic 8^1000. If you split this up into
         | 10 modules of 100 instructions, issues like credit assignment
         | and smoothness of the solution space dramatically improve.
         | 8^100 is still really bad, but compared to 8^1000 its
         | astronomically better.
        
       | jeden wrote:
       | make a 'core wars'
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2026-03-08 23:00 UTC)