Conways Game of Life on Blockchain | Hacker News Reader

Conways Game of Life on Blockchain

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68 pointsjeromeof48 comments

The most expensive implementation of Conway's Game of Life ever - over $2,000 per step! (Probably the slowest too!)

Then try to calculate the energy / processing power spent per step.

Assuming some market efficiency, those fees should be fairly similar to the cost to process that transaction into a block, so, 2,000 usd

This assumes that there's no inflation I believe. But on Ethereum there is inflation.

Until EIP 1559 goes into effect in July, then it might vary between deflationary and inflationary at times.

The electricity isn't just paying for the one transaction it's paying to secure all historical transactions and all current balances.

When counting how expensive a visa transaction is, you don't also consider the price of all the bank vaults in the world and the staff protecting those vaults, because protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new transactions.

There is a point to be made, but you've made it all wrong.

You could argue that the $2000 transaction is actually validating all previous transactions... which sure. I will grant you that.

But by that reasoning, you need to amortize all future purchases as paying for part of the Game of Life transaction! If you do that then the cost of the transaction approaches INFINITY DOLLARS as time goes to infinity!

Obviously, this way of looking at the cost of the transaction is useless to the point of being meaningless. So let's stick with $2000, which has a clear meaning in reality.

The security isn't there to protect historic transactions, it's there to protect the holdings of current holders. If I had a bitcoin at one point and no longer have that bitcoin, I'm completely indifferent about the security of the transactions involving that bitcoin because it no longer impacts me.

Also, the cost per transaction - even if viewed through that lens - does not approach infinity as time goes to infinity because there would be an infinite number of transactions as well.

I honestly can’t tell which model you’re arguing in favor of.

The proof-of-work mechanism for blockchains is broken into two elements. There's the inflation element, which is a reward for miners that is independent of transaction volume, and then there's the transaction fee element.

The inflation element exists to secure the blockchain, and is proportional to the total amount of value being held on the blockchain. As the coin price goes up (independent of any transaction activity), the amount of reward for PoW mining also goes up. It doesn't make sense to count this part of the PoW reward a cost of transacting because the purpose is unrelated to transacting and also if transacting completely halts the expense does not go away.

> protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new transactions.

But for blockchain, those are the same thing. You cannot add new transactions to the blockchain without doing the work to secure it.

Yes you can. If the token price falls substantially and the fee pressure disappears you can continue transacting without adding work to secure the blockchain.

This is actually one of the largest open problems for Bitcoin. In a few years, the inflation will drop below a point where it is enough to secure the blockchain, meaning the security of Bitcoin is entirely dependent on revenue from transaction fees, which only exist if there are more transactions trying to get into blocks than there is block space to hold the transactions.

If Bitcoin doesn't have enough transaction demand, you will be able to transact on bitcoin for nearly free without contributing to the security at all, which is a very bad thing for Bitcoin as a whole.

How much would it cost on Tezos?

Kind of amazing that a super slow, super expensive computing architecture like this has actually turned out to be very useful for some things.

I absolutely love this.

One of the more poetic reasons why I like Ethereum VM is because it seems likely to keep running for a very, very long time. I would take a Long Bet that it will still exist 100 years in the future.

With that in mind, this might end up being the longest "continuously running" (both words with some heavy qualifiers) Conway's Game of Life implementation.

Never mind 100 years in the future, this game of life implementation isn't running even now. As the article says, it would cost $80 just to register the code to run it, never mind funding each compute step.

And yet your phone could compute the next 100 years of this ethereum GoL calculations in far less than a second!

I wouldn't bet on my phone's processor being functional in the XXIInd century, but this code will likely still be in EVM, ready to run.

Sure, it's a very different beast, but I still find it really _cool_.

But that's my point, it is already NOT in the EVM, the cost is so high that the author didn't commit the code to it - ethereum fell at the very first hurdle!

Unfortunately for naysayers, Ethereum or other blockchains will achieve cheap and long running dapps sooner or later.

“Naysayers”? Technologies do not prove themselves in a court of opinion. They prove themselves in the field. Critics are essential to any emerging technology; their criticism gives us a chance to fix its weaknesses.

That being said, The Paris Agreement and I hope you’re right.

Next year on the blockchain!

People will still be able to play Super Mario Bros, even though the last NES will be long gone. Code of any real value will be preserved by enthusiasts, and be run via emulation or ported to modern systems.

Meanwhile, most of todays blockchains will be dead. No nodes left to sync with. Maybe the blockchain concept will live on in a new form, but even now, there seem to be dying blockchains that are very difficult to connect to and use (e.g. Dogecoin, at least before the recent price surge)

I guess a real threat to all historical code would be the end of open computing, and the requirement for any code run anywhere to be signed and censored by a megacorporation. Something we're getting worryingly close to. But in that world, most of today's blockchains will quickly die, too.

Ethereum doesn't have a mechanism to run an operation periodically. If you want this game to step forward you need to make a new transaction and pay new fees.

In the category "how can I contribute the most to the global climate change problem", we have a contender.

Clearly the next step is to move NAO to the blockchain, so we can play nethack in the most immutable and verifiable way possible! (Congrats to OP. I find the project fascinating nonetheless :))

Suggestion- Could we implement soup search with the blockchain?(https://catagolue.hatsya.com/apgsearch)

The 'largest distributed search site of cellular automata', Catagolue, which discovers new patterns everyday, has enormous potential of pattern finding, trading and synchronous exhibiting. Could we embed soup search as a backend PoW

If I could buy an NFT of the source code of this, would I have reached peak blockchain meta?

Only if you used chainlink to mint a new NFT per step. Then staked the NFTs on a different chain using a trust less bridge.

Quiet, they'll hear you.

Not peak, since someone will eventually buy the NFT for this HN comment.

Minting NFTs of NFTs is the next level.

I may have beat that, the day before Jack Dorsey blew up the service I bid on the tweet of the CryptoKitties Genesis NFT.

So a NFT of a Tweet of an NFT.

Not without first writing a spec for adding NFTs to bitcoin, I'm afraid.

We need to go deeper. Game of life Mona Lisa on the block chain. Could end up rivaling the value of the actual Mona Lisa.

Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever.

Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go!

Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript https://docs.near.org/

NEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably the slowest too!)" :D NEAR is perfect to run a high performance simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/ where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the meanwhile

You could put it on a side chain. On matic gas is essentially free.

So, is there proof of work for every single cell transition?

Please, stop it. Some things just shouldn't be.

It's deployed in a test network. The carbon footprint of this little experiment is negligible:

"This application would be able to run 'forever' - so long as there was some funds in an Ethereum account that could be used to run each 'step'.

However, the cost of Ethereum (and therefore 'gas') used to run smart contracts is so high that it would cost (in March 2021) over $80 just to register the smart contract, and to run a single 'step' of the game would cost over $2,000! No doubt that the code could be made more efficient and consume less resources, but hey that's just too much work for a concept app, so I have simply registered the contract on the Kovan test network instead, and use some 'fake' Ethereum to run the system. The app is the same, but it just points to the 'Kovan' test network instead of the Ethereum mainnet."

Could undecidability similar to that of Conway or another halting problem be used to better solve security of financial transactions?

If it’s ubersecure maybe it would outperform Moore’s Law, quantum computing, and the hyper-intelligent AIs.

Is -this-, finally, the killer app?

  or, the way Skynet comes about?

No. And No.

> No. And No.

I thought as much ...

(At least you've taken the time to reply - even to a tongue in cheek comment - instead of taking to the downvotes, which I appreciate ...)

Considering EVM fees, I find it endlessly fascinating that people are paying for computation per cycle, on a distributed VM.-

It blows one away ...

(Also, a pity that Conway is not here to opine on this.)

  I strain under some miner's vengeful glee
  four points below
  smitten with a pick axe to the heart,
  my question's right though:
  is this the killer app?

  Prometheus' fire was deemed too vain a thing
  compared to blocked chained trees ...
  And yet, were lies the gain?
  Untold amounts of money changing hands amount to naught
  compared to all the promises of gold
  and a world changed, made by Satoshisan
  not long ago.

  A decade and some years passed
  much DeFi's come and gone
  and neither acolytes of doom
  nor coiners wild
  can tell, in truth
  who's winning most.
  (If any at all ...)

  Society? I highly doubt.
  Today at least.

  Satoshi's promise though, lives on
  in every mint.

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