Posted by nooks 7 hours ago
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
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.
I would probably need to find a similar language with a different name though.
You don’t really get any of that with brainfuck. You have a theoretical tape and counters and that’s basically it.
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.
(If you don't recognize that use of "shipping", don't google it at work.)
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!
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
> 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.
Almost 10 years of development.
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.
I was a bit confused by that wiki page because it says "Direction Orthogonal" but like you said that can't be.
We all know how to do that, but that's not why were here.
What we’re less capable of—and the reason we look to each other here instead—is distinguishing where the LLM’s errors or misinterpretations lie. The gross mistakes are often easy enough to spot, but the subtle misstatements get masked by its overconfidence.
Luckily for us, a lot of the same people actually doing the work on the stuff we care about tend to hang out around here. And often, they’re kind enough to duck in and share.
Thank you in any case for being upfront about it. It’s just that it’d be a shame and a real loss if the slop noise came to drown out the signal here.
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!"
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...
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.
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.
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.
I picture entities playing with our universe, "it starts slow but check it out at the 13.8B mark"
I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and work it belies. Congrats to those involved!
https://parkscomputing.com/page/conways-game-of-life?boardSi...
That produces a spinner, because the empty cells above and below the 1d row have three live cells nearby.
glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship
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.