Eternal Struggle - Hacker News

Posted by yurivish 8/31/2025

https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal

679 points | 136 comments

francisduvivier 8/31/2025|

Some people here were asking for it so I quickly vibe forked a speed control slider for farming some karma here on Hacker News:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

Code: https://github.com/francisduvivier/eternal-struggle-with-spe...

wvbdmp 8/31/2025||

Not to alarm anyone, but when I ran this, the black ball eventually joined the dark side and the whole thing ended up black. I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything for the greater universe.

soneca 8/31/2025|||

This happened to me in the original site. I think it happens when the white and black balls collide at the exact same spot of the border.

francisduvivier 9/1/2025||

I think it's just a tunneling bug that happens when the point that make up the wall get messed up a enough. Almost never happens anymore in the v2[1] that I added. This one also allows you to see these points.

[1] https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

anthk 9/1/2025||

Declare it as a Quantum tunneling effect :p

temp0826 9/1/2025||||

A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone

Cthulhu_ 9/1/2025||

Here we have it, an internet toy demonstrating how this asymmetry occurred. I expect physics papers soon.

temp0826 9/1/2025||

Nobel prizes for everyone!

nialv7 9/1/2025||||

black-white here doesn't mean bad-good. they just mean opposites, different aspects of things. I think wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

kragen 9/1/2025||

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%99%B0#Traditional_Chinese (陰) lists the following definitions:

1. cloudy; overcast; gloomy

2. hidden; secret

3. negative [of electrical charge]

4. the Moon

5. shade; shadow

6. north of a mountain or south of a river

7. back side

8. of the nether world; of ghosts

9. (philosophy) "female" principle; yin in yin-yang

10. in intaglio

11. treacherous; deceitful; cheating

12. (dialectal) to deceive; to trick; to trap

13. (Chinese phonetics, of a syllable) open; not having a consonant coda

14. (Cantonese) bangs; fringe

15. genitalia (of humans)

16. a surname

The one (American) person I know who has 陰 as a surname reports that Chinese people are often shocked at her surname upon meeting her. I think it might be a bit like having the surname Death in English (https://www.ancestry.com/last-name-meaning/death?geo-lang=en...).

That is to say, black kind of does mean "bad" here, in the popular conception anyway. Taoism and Buddhism promote a worldview that sees birth and death, creation and destruction, as neither good nor bad, simply inseparable parts of a larger whole. But most everyday people try to avoid darkness, death, destruction, cloudiness, gloominess, shadows, ghosts, treachery, traps, and so on, most of the time. It's more that Taoism teaches that this attempt is foolish.

Not all the senses are unpopular; plenty of people like human genitalia, the Moon, and intaglio, and the shady side of a river can be nicer when it's hot out.

raspasov 9/1/2025||||

The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).

bilbo-b-baggins 8/31/2025||||

Metaphor for American politics.

low_tech_punk 9/1/2025||||

maxwell's demon peeking from the dark side

camillomiller 9/1/2025||||

Had the same experience and derived an absolutely unexpected bout of deep existential anxiety from it. Going to touch grass now.

d4rkn0d3z 9/1/2025||||

Tunneling.

gedy 9/1/2025|||

"I am.. Tetsuo."

Hendrikto 9/1/2025|||

> vibe forked a speed control slider

Very on brand, it does not work correctly. I can turn the speed up but not back down again.

francisduvivier 9/1/2025||

Yes true :D, I kind of just want to blame gpt-5 mini for it and that's one of the bad things about the bad coding, I immediately loose part of the sense of ownership and responsibility. I don't feel like I made it, I just managed it.

Now to be honest I saw this bug, but I decided to just release it anyways because I also already had the v2 in the works which incidentally already had this issue fixed.

rnotaro 8/31/2025|||

This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

If you go to 64.00×, it can't slow back anymore.

francisduvivier 8/31/2025|||

Well that's fixed in the V2 with even more vibe coding:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

ks2048 8/31/2025|||

Watching it at 100x is cool - you can just watch the border wiggle around (at this speed you may as well not even draw the balls).

patates 9/1/2025||||

I think next level would be custom shapes, custom starting areas, more colors, ability to change physics (add gravity?), and user interacting (being able to help a fellow struggling entity -a ball in this case-, when it gets worse).

Someone put this into an AI super duper thinking max edition, sprinkle some MCP on top and see what happens lol

nandomrumber 9/1/2025||

Rapidly converging on Conways Game of Life

rottc0dd 9/1/2025|||

Nice work.

Still buggy. If you increase the ball size and increase the speed, the whole thing goes black/white in 10 seconds.

hk__2 9/2/2025||||

> This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

Isn’t that the main characteristic of vibe-coded code anyway?

ks2048 8/31/2025|||

Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).

rhubarbtree 9/1/2025|||

Interesting data point on the vibe coding front, as this is very buggy. Doesn’t bode well for releasing an agent on a non-trivial problem!

narrator 9/1/2025|||

It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.

loandbehold 9/1/2025||

Why not other way around?

kelnos 9/1/2025|||

Feature request: show a "scoreboard", that is, with every collision, show the percent of the circle that's white, and percent that's black.

maxlin 9/1/2025|||

Thanks :D I did really want to know what kind of shape it would tend towards over time.

Running 100x for some moments, the white part got pincer maneuvered by the black and I ended up with the whole circle becoming black. Don't know what to think of that lol

pmontra 9/1/2025|||

Of course we want to make a ball faster than the other one and let it win the struggle.

brcmthrowaway 9/1/2025||

At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?

patates 9/1/2025||

something about monitor refresh rate perhaps?

https://www.testufo.com

MrJohz 8/31/2025||

The cool thing about this is that it's self-balancing - if either side gets larger than the other due to random chance, the ball in that side will have more space to bounce in, and therefore bounce less often, slowing its growth. Meanwhile, the ball in the smaller side will bounce more often in its smaller space, making up the ground.

SonOfLilit 8/31/2025||

There are stableish equilibria that are not 50-50, e.g. one color having a donut around the other color that has a donut hole.

istjohn 8/31/2025|||

Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.

aoeusnth1 9/1/2025||||

That's not a stable equilibrium if the hits have a large enough effect with respect to the movement of the balls. The internal circle will create disturbances against both sides of the inner circle, but the outer ball will have to travel a longer distance to move from one side to the other to counter them.

n2d4 8/31/2025||||

Now the question remains, are there stableish equilibria that are 50/50? Splitting it into two half-circles sounds like an equilibrium at first glance, but I'm not convinced it is, as only a tiny bit of random luck seems to make it become a "horseshoe" pattern instead.

(That assumes that the simulation is randomized of course, which doesn't seem to be the case for the one in the link posted here.)

amelius 9/1/2025|||

It seems there is a parallel with physics: two pressurized chambers with equal pressure and a membrane separating them. The odd thing here is that there is only one molecule in each of them.

nandomrumber 9/1/2025||

All models are wrong…

d4rkn0d3z 9/1/2025||

But some are useful.

Animats 8/31/2025|||

It's amazing how stable it is. It's been running in a background tab for a hour now, and it still has the yin/yang look.

Liron 8/31/2025|||

I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused

dotancohen 8/31/2025||

That's in another two months.

poopsmithe 9/1/2025|||

Yeah, definitely run it in the foreground. Mine became completely black in about 3 hours.

Animats 9/1/2025||

Me too. Does black always win? If so, why?

amelius 9/1/2025||

But you can say the same thing about a circle with a straight line as separator.

teamworketernal 8/31/2025||

I was cheering on the black circle's tunneling project when they both got caught in a rapid-fire spiral and the black one glitched through to the other side.

https://imgur.com/a/dhCSNmi

panarchy 8/31/2025||

I think it misinterpreted what kind of tunneling you were cheering on.

volemo 8/31/2025|||

The darkness has come upon the world!

cocoto 8/31/2025|||

Had the exact same bug! Not so rare I think.

camtarn 8/31/2025|||

Hah! I was wondering if that was possible.

fuckaj 8/31/2025||

[dead]

alyxya 8/31/2025||

I watched it for an hour, and at some point the black ball crossed the boundary onto the black side, so eventually the whole circle became black.

drob518 8/31/2025||

It went to the dark side.

SarahC_ 9/1/2025||

The coming of Satan is foretold!

hk__2 8/31/2025||

Source code: https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal

dang 9/1/2025|

We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!

SkipperCat 8/31/2025||

An excellent piece of artwork! Really captures the meaning of Yin Yang, at least to me.

sabellito 8/31/2025||

Got a horseshoe shape running at 50x for 60 seconds:

https://imgur.com/a/b6b2IDx

andoando 8/31/2025|

Same, if one of them punches through in one place, that hole shapes the angle of the bounces and reinforces itself and the other side fills in around the hole.

Insanity 8/31/2025||

I guess it’s supposed to start on mouse move (based on skimming the source code).

On a phone it doesn’t seem to trigger unless I changed the background so I spent a minute just staring at the symbol without anything happening lol :D

chunkles 8/31/2025|

If you tap on the ying-yang it starts.

bqmjjx0kac 8/31/2025||

Hmm, not on iOS Safari.

Insanity 8/31/2025||

Yup that’s the browser I am using as well.

throwaway314155 8/31/2025||

change the background

Insanity 9/1/2025||

Yup.. read my original comment :)

kingforaday 9/1/2025||

You can press 'p' to show the points on the curves.

  function keyPressed() {
    if (key === 'p') SHOW_POINTS = !SHOW_POINTS;
  }

clocker 8/31/2025|

reminded me of this one that ends at some point

https://ask5.github.io/gold-wars/

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