Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video]

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227 pointseigenvalue31 comments

And the looped version https://coub.com/view/25kpyt

Color me awed.

This is amazing

Every time I watch this video, I get a sense of existential crisis. Another cool video that relaxes me is this one [0]. It feeds another type of Turing complete cellular automaton called Rule 110 [1] into Game of Life.

[0] https://youtu.be/P2uhhAXd7PI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

That’s really creative to combine the two CAs like that, I’ve never seen that done before. It suggests a whole algebra of the objects that result from composing two systems.

This simulation is used in an analysis of self-referential dynamics: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02456

I recently posted other impressive Life patterns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851258

Reminder: please always post arXiv links to the abstract page, not directly to the PDF. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456

Mind blowing as this is, I feel the video would be much improved if it gave some visibility to the birth/death transition in the second order cells while still zoomed in enough to see a bit more of the workings of the first order elements.

Are there any visualizations that you can recommend that capture what you describe?

Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB-uHfScjU

I show this video to all incoming software engineering interns.

It's partially educational and partly just very amusing watching their brains leak out of their ears.

This one was among the suggested videos. I could only dream of a game engine based on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing. Manifold Garden and Antichamber non Euclidean 3D games. Antichamber is quite good.

The subtitles for the video are great. Somewhat related, the OTCA Metapixel was also used to implement Tetris (well, an entire RISC computer and high-level language, really) in Life: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

Has this submission ever reached the HN homepage? I personally tried to submit it twice but no upvotes at all, which I believe it deserves. I just checked the history again [0], none of the post ever made it, which is unfortunate. I thought Hacker News readers would be interested in a RISC processor built in the Game of Life.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcodegolf.stackexchan...

Sadly, Hacker News can be quite fickle…

Getting upvotes to get on the front page is fairly political sadly.

I won't say it's political, and it isn't about karma. There are political submissions (I sometimes submit/upvote political articles deliberately to "test the water", i.e. not because I agree, I simply want to see what are the opinions here), and there are cases when people care about karma.

But often, there are simply many technically interesting articles you'd want to share, and I have a small history of success of submitting technically interesting articles to the homepage with no politics involved, such as tips and tricks of microcontrollers or the use of 50-ohm transmission line in RF engineering. My conclusion is that an attractive title [0] and some luck is needed. However, I tried to include the keyword "Building a RISC processor in Game of Life", but it still fails to get any votes.

My conclusion is, unfortunately, the majority of HN reader doesn't know what the Game of Life is and/or doesn't think building things in GoF is attractive.

[0] HN has a fairly strict "original title" rule to discourage clickbait, I mostly agree, but sometimes a title genuinely doesn't completely explain and provide enough context about what is in the article, which is otherwise interesting. No votes and no readers would be the result, which isn't really fair.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348

First hit when searching for Tetris.

Thanks for the link. It turns out to be better than I expected!

GOL can be made into a turing machine so this shouldnt come as a surprise https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing-M...

John Conway, inventor of the game of life, just passed out because of coronavirus. :(

What blows my mind about this is not the universal computation simulating itself, but that it looks a lot like ribosomes decoding RNA and making protein. And then flashing that it doesn't just look like them.

Serious question, how did they discover this? AFAIK GoL patterns can't be reverse engineered.

Life is turing complete, so there was no need to “reverse engineer it”, they built a computer that is simply simulating life, in life.

You can think about it step-by-step: first you need some rectangular structure that has two well-defined states to represent your cells, then you think of how to implement periodic refresh and communication between neighboring cells, some gadgets for and/or gates, etc. As you have gliders, glider guns, and similar building blocks, it is not that difficult, given enough patience. Very nice to look at though :)

Based on following the links in the video details, it looks like it's built around something called the OCTA metapixel [0][1][2].

Conceptually, I could see how once you have an "abstract programmable pixel" with mechanisms to change how they interact with each other, it becomes "straightforward", since you can abstract away the concept of a pixel and its interaction with neighbors.

[0] https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel

[1] https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-work....

[2] https://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html

For more insight on designing GoL circuits: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/111932

The hardware metaphor seems apt, as GoL has a speed of light & the parts operate concurrently

So not sure what you mean by reverse engineered, maybe you're getting hung up on Kolmogorov complexity being incomputable

How did they recover this...?

You might find some of the details of its construction interesting: https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details. While it doesn't explain the inspiration behind it, it does show that there's a definite structure to it.

This one is also pretty fascinating - https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Deep_cell

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