[1] From 2014: http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-vie...
Strange that no one was there to tell them they are wrong. Anyway, how could they get it wrong in the age of Internet? Every bit of information about 'Game of Life' is one click away... :( Agree - that's sad...
They decided meanwhile that they would like to celebrate Wolfram instead?
Or is there any artistic value to celebrate someone with other persons achievements? Some kind of twisted post-modern artistic message about authorship?
Or it looks better for them? For example: lets pay tribute to Amundsen reaching the South pole with polar bear images (because they are so cute)?
By Occam razor: ignorance is the best explanation. ;)
Maybe Game of Life simply doesn't produce patterns as interesting as Rule 30? With GoL you can only show one generation.
Maybe they were going for the randomness that rule 30 provides (you can build a PRNG from it) but Game of Life doesn't?
http://aperiodical.com/2017/05/right-answer-for-the-wrong-re...
They're professionals like you. Give them some credit.
Imagine that you go to a Shakespeare festival but they only recite T. S. Eliot. When you are disappointed, they say:
"Look these are all poems. They are very similar on the surface, but Eliot somehow sounds better to the modern ear. Long live Shakespeare!"
They tried it out, realized it didn't look great, then looked for what most people who don't have a CS degree would consider similar enough and also looked nice.
This sort of reasonable compromise happens all the time. In the software industry, if you picked ideological purity over pragmatism you wouldn't be a great engineer.
You may have a point if this was a museum celebrating Conway, but it isn't.
Static: http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png
Animated: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1
My initial quotation was this from the press release:
The architects said the aluminium design is derived from John Conway's Game of Life 'cellular automaton',
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/could-ca...
You can't protect this with some kind of "we all come from gogol's overcoat", mentality. If it is true then they should have put a Gogol image there! ;)
And you may think it's trivial, but it's exactly how - step by step, creative decision by creative decision - we turn each other into idiots with little clue about how reality works. Something that was discussed at length just few hours ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
See also: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect.
I strongly second the quote that I once found on the Internet: "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires".
> "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires"
Regardless of whether the first sentence is accurate (and indeed it certainly seems accurate), I believe the prescription given in the second sentence is not entirely accurate.
Slashing someone's tires is absolutely/always illegal (property damage, or whatever the term is for causing it) ... whereas sabotaging someone's beliefs is illegal iff the "someone" is a court of law or government official, or if the belief-being-sabotaged is about a living person such that a falsehood constitutes slander.
As such, sabotage of beliefs is possible in some cases where tire-slashing is not.
Also, in terms of real-world consequences, sabotaging someone's thinking can be very, very much worse than just breaking their car.
I see.
> Don't promote less than maximally accurate beliefs unless you hate someone so much you'd be willing to go and slash their tires.
Yet is it not conceivable to hate someone thoroughly, but not enough to be willing to sacrifice one's entire career/reputation/criminal-record by committing any kind of actual crime?
I really do not understand the reasoning behind this statement.
Sabotage of the belief system and slashing tires are very different. Fundamentally different I would say.
Slashing tires leads to an outcome that becomes very quickly obvious to the victim and is easily repairable.
Sabotage of the belief system goes very likely unnoticed to a person and can last for hundreds generations and is very difficult to repair.
Sabotage of beliefs is not understood to be a crime.
If people understood how much damage it could cause then they perhaps would reconsider it.
They didn't; e.g. playing the lottery as an adult is both legal and insanely idiotic. (Don't misunderstand me; I do like it that the insanely idiotic are able to self-select themselves away from their money with such ease.)
But on the other hand, "legally can and causes more utility gain per unit time than any other course of action" ... does indeed imply "should".
(And unless you're really silly, "utility gain" simplifies to "monetary gain".)
Of course, I'm not trying to imply that sabotage-of-beliefs is that powerful an action; indeed, my ultimate conclusion is that neither tire-slashing nor sabotage-of-beliefs present a compelling benefit-per-cost.
Yeah, that's why I always turn down my friends when they ask if I want to go see a movie. Monetarily, it's nothing but a loss, and I would have to be "really silly" to value an entertaining experience.
Or if you're doing it for personal gain, in which case it may be fraud.
OOoh, disagree. What yields purity is the clash of a pure vision with the constraints of reality. You can't be really "pragmatic" until you've tried really hard to "do the right thing" and failed and looked for alternatives. If you don't even try, you're not being "pragmatic"; just lazy and boring.
What if they decided to go with Rule30 instead of GoL, precisely because they knew there'd be geeks out here that would be arguing about these things, infinitely, while a majority of people will just think its a great example of the kind of mathematical complexity that exists in the universe, either way you look at it?
People like "alternative facts" - both on the believer and the debater side, so give em' what they want for fun and profit? :) That is a fine point, but I simply do not like the value system behind it: to be ignorant or pretend to be ignorant because that's what people like
You were already given several times the same reasonable explanation. It looks like GoL, and if the architects had said "we used 'rule 30'", absolutely no one would have had a clue what they are talking about. By saying they were inspired by GoL, at least a few people will think 'I vaguely heard of that, it's cool'. It's called pedagogy. Sometimes, being 100% accurate is not helpful.
It is just my opinion - it is not hard science but art, so maybe no one can be right here: you can just choose not to read my comments if you anticipate in advance that you will disagree ;)
edit: By the way they not said "inspired" by GoL but that they derived the pattern from it. I admit I'm not a native english speaker but I feel some difference... For you if it is the same, or it is fine "pedagogically" then good for you.
You can build a PRNG in Game of Life, since you can build a Turing Machine.
The only possible exception we know of is quantum computers.
Ha ha. There's professional courtesy, but at the same time there are annoying truths (like rampant ignorance perhaps only barely above the general population, depending on the profession) we don't like to discuss in an unspoken agreement.
Honestly it just seems like a poorly communicated marketing blurb more than anything else. They wanted to say it's based on cellular automata because they're cool, and they can link the location to a guy somewhat famous even in the general population for something to do with automata (under the phrase GoL). An analogous situation might be some architecture using a Sierpinski pattern and having a blurb on how they derived it from fractals, and could relate the location to Mandelbrot.
GoL is Turing complete. I guess that means there is a starting condition that converges to a rule30 cellular automaton.
edit: video of GoL emulated inside a turing machine in GoL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 (link replaced)
That is one damn insecure guy.
In other words, no "Wow Cambridge honored me and my amazing automata!", lots of "These patterns I've loved for years are on a building and that is really exciting."
For "A New Kind of Science", here is the index entry:
Conway, John H. (England/USA, 1937- )
and arithmetic recurrences, 1115
and Game of Life, 877, 880, 949
and iterated run-length encoding, 905
and non-periodic tilings, 943
in Preface, xiii
and recursive sequences, 907
and universality of Life, 1117
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_MAX_Station#El...
1. To their way of thinking, what we think of as "superclasses" are more like classes to them. i.e. They see little difference between GoL and Rule 30. They are essentially the same to them. The aesthetics are similar and the process is similar. Most importantly, the intention or thought process which produced the technique is almost identical.
I like the example below about Eliot vs. Shakespeare, although it's a bit overblown. I don't think architects would go so far as to conflate an entire museum to the entire works of two different individual's lives, especially when the two had such differing approaches to playwrighting. YET, conflating variants of two individuals' algorithms is within their scope, clumsy as it is.
2. Furthermore, architecture is an unclean collusion of politics, aesthetics and technique. It's very difficult for all three of these parties to have the same vision. Errors get amplified. White lies persist to save feelings, face and budgets.
3. In conclusion, yes they are wrong and intellectually lazy, and emotionally fearful about making it right. That brings me to my last point about architecture: Once it's erected, it's generally there to stay, baby. A bird in the hand. This is why architecture is so valuable to politicians. On three fronts: it's protection in the form of walls. It's production in the form of moving people where they need to go. It's influence in the form of symbolic power which will dominate the thinking of all those who pass through those walls. For many years. Who can argue against the triumph of digital patterns in shaping our generation?
Even though we're right, we're right like Big Bang Theory characters. No one wants to agree with us, because we're subordinate to the power of architecture (as leveraged by state politics). Our objections are a cute footnote on a museum tour for your aunt to amaze you with on a holiday weekend :)
As an architect and software developer I will bet my hat that the architects knew exactly what was going on, but said that it was based on the GoL precisely because it would pass the budget.
I wouldn't be surprised if it started out with the GoL, but, thanks to budget reasons, they were forced to fabricate multiple identical panels rather than a total unique facade, and switched to a CA.
Fabricating/plasma cutting such a facade would be hugely pricey and the only thing that would let it survive against a bottom line budget is a political reason - aka a talking point.
(Ok-ok, I know it is just a fun comment, but just to be serious anyway for the sake of truth:
you can think of how likely that this is a GoL pattern: take the set of all imaginable GoL patterns, at all timestep, and check how frequent is this subpattern then, compared to some combination of some common/well-know patterns, like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Exampl... )
For a rule like Life, there are many possible configurations that must have been created by God or somebody with a bitmap editor (or somebody who thinks he's God and uses Mathematica as a bitmap editor, like Stephen Wolfram ;), because it would have been impossible for the Life rule to evolve into those states. For example, with the "Life" rule, no possible configuration of cells could ever evolve into all cells with the value "1".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom...
For a rule that simply sets the cell value to zero, all configurations other than pure zeros are garden of eden states, and they all lead directly into a one step attractor of all zeros which always evolves back into itself, all zeros again and again (the shortest possible attractor loop that leads directly to itself).
There is a way of graphically visualizing that global rule state space, which gives insight into the behavior of the rule and the texture and complexity of its state space!
Andrew Wuensche and Mike Lesser published a gorgeous coffee table book entitled "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata" that plots out the possible "Garden of Eden" states and the "Basins of Attraction" they lead into of many different one-dimensional cellular automata like rule 30.
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/gdca.html
The beautiful color plates begin on page 79 in the free pdf file:
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/global_dyn...
I've uploaded the money shots to imgur:
http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz
Those are not pictures of 1-d cellular automata rule cell states on a grid themselves, but they are actually graphs of the abstract global state space, showing merging and looping trajectories (but not branching since the rules are deterministic -- time flows from the garden of eden leaf tips around the perimeter into (then around) the basin of attractor loops in the center, merging like springs (GOE) into tributaries into rivers into the ocean (BOA)).
The rest of the book is an atlas of all possible 1-d rules of a particular rule numbering system (like rule 30, etc), and the last image is the legend.
He developed a technique of computing and plotting the topology network of all possible states a CA can get into -- tips are "garden of eden" states that no other states can lead to, and loops are "basins of attraction".
Here is the illustration of "rule 30" from page 144 (the legend explaining it is the last photo in the above album). [I am presuming it's using the same rule numbering system as Wolfram but I'm not sure -- EDIT: I visually checked the "space time pattern from a singleton seed" thumbnail against the illustration in the article, and yes it matches rule 30!]
"The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata introduces a powerful new perspective for the study of discrete dynamical systems. After first looking at the unique trajectory of a system's future, an algoritm is presented that directly computes the multiple merging trajectories of the systems past. A given cellular automaton will "crystallize" state space into a set of basins of attraction that typically have a topology of trees rooted on attractor cycles. Portraits of these objects are made accessible through computer generated graphics. The "Atlas" presents a complete class of such objects, and is inteded , with the accompanying software, as an aid to navigation into the vast reaches of rule behaviour space. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in cellular automata, complex systems, computational theory, artificial life, neural networks, and aspects of genetics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
"Basins of attraction in cellular automata", by Andrew Wuensche:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/...
"To achieve the global perspective. I devised a general method for running CA backwards in time to compute a state's predecessors with a direct reverse algorithm. So the predecessors of predecessors, and so on, can be computed, revealing the complete subtree including the "leaves," states without predecessors, the so-called “garden-of-Eden" states.
Trajectories must lead to attractors in a finite CA, so a basin of attraction is composed of merging trajectories, trees, rooted on the states making up the attractor cycle with a period of one or more. State-space is organized by the "physics" underlying the dynamic behavior into a number of these basins of attraction, making up the basin of attraction field."
Or maybe this is a joke at Wolfram's expense, attributing one of his own to Conway.