Emoji simulator – a tool to make cellular automata, with emoji | Hacker News Reader

Emoji simulator – a tool to make cellular automata, with emoji

ncase.me

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From the same author, the evolution of trust, https://ncase.me/trust/

That is an interesting game. Thanks for sharing.

Yay, that's so nice. Very similar to (perhaps based of?) the 12th chapter _Nice Guys Finish First_ of the Selfish Gene.

Really cool visualization of the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Reminds me of something I remember playing with years ago, where you could draw various materials on the screen. Brick, sand, water, and then add different types of explosives. A really fun simulation all in the browser.

Anyone remember what this is?

Powder? https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust2/

Very similar to this! I wonder if someone else had re-made it since then.

Check out sandspiel: https://sandspiel.club/

Here's another powder simulation, https://powdertoy.co.uk/. This one still has an active community and development team, and people have built all kinds of cool things with it like actual computers that can be programmed with assembly.

The aforementioned sandspiel is excellent, along with orb.farm (by the same author), and (shameless plug) my own entry in the genre: https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox

Oh, God; that brings back memories. It was like the Windows 3.1 days, right?

OE-Cake? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OE-Cake!

Well that was delightful to play with, and I learned some stuff. Thank you!

Why are the links on the right not actual links? Yuck.

What happened to the glider hacker emblem? A pity it never took off..

It didn’t go anywhere, here it is: https://www.catb.org/hacker-emblem/

I always thought that it was a symbol with unfortunate connotations of time-wasting. If you want to market youself with a symbol of something which is ultimately a useless distraction, this is not a attractive branding.

In what ways are conways-game-of-life or the glider-pattern associated with time-wasting?

The Game of Life is a fun toy, but ultimately unproductive. It does not inherently lead to anything else either; the entire field is a dead end (no matter what Stephen Wolfram says). And, what’s worse, people more or less knew this at the time, and still they let most of the best minds of a generation, as it were, be absorbed into doing nothing but the equivalent of mental navel-gazing.

Thanks, it's interesting you see it that way - but I've never seen that view common among 'hackers'.

So, I doubt that's the factor why the symbol hasn't been more widely-used, emblematically. I instead suspect mixed-feelings about anything ESR proposes, or just more generally the fact that hackers are so varied in interests/behavior that there's little need for a shared emblem. (Though, the glider appeals to a certain mindset, who have & will use it as a symbol, as when it appeared in many remembrances after John Conway's passing.)

it froze my chrome on android completely. it was hard to stop

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