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Comment by dexter313 | Hacker News Reader

Awesome, but the results/behaviour (in the video) don't seem very complex like the original Conway's game of life.

It does seem more "organic", if you will.

It does. Still I think the point of game of life is not to look organic but to make complex thing from very simple rules. Like supposedly the universe we live in. Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, no computer can do that of course.

Well, generations don't have to be rendered in realtime, so you could just grab some high cpu instances on AWS and compute really large sizes. For example, this guy made a turing machine, and it's pretty huge: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

And that was in 2000. I'm sure we could do extremely large boards now.

> Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough,

Are you sure? This isn't obvious to me.

check out hashlife and some of the larger landscapes.

Thank you, mind blown! Downloaded "Golly" (http://golly.sourceforge.net/) and ran HashLife/metapixel.

Life simulating life, and it runs in real time.

Mind blown pretty much describes what I felt like when I first came upon it.

After spending a good bit of time optimizing 'life' having your ass handed to you by a large number of orders of magnitude courtesy of mr. Norvig is a good lesson in humility.

hashlife is a pretty brilliant algorithm. basically it sort of memoizes patterns at different scales. highly recommended to check out the details of how it works.

> no computer can do that of course

Just check the frontpage again in a few years.

> Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, no computer can do that of course.

How far do you want to zoom out?

All the way.

"Make complex things from simple rules" - that's pretty much defining organic in this sense.

no computer can do that of course.

we are getting there - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

Outstanding, thank you for this. Worth a post on its own don't you think?

It had one, 4 months ago. No comments, only 4 points.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4014078)

I think I've seen it before that too, from HN.

That's the video in the same blog if you click "Previous": http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/05/turtles-all-the-way-down-or-...

And you can run that in real time on a desktop. The secret is a hash life approach.

>It does. Still I think the point of game of life is not to look organic but to make complex thing from very simple rules.

Em, it's called "Game of Life" because the whole point was for it to look and behave _organic (Wikipedia: "Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself").

Lifelike might be the term you're looking for... :)

It seems to have much simpler behavior - gliders, bridges, and bricks. Don't think we're going to discover any prime number generators with this version of Life.

Right - can you still build a UTM in this?

If you could, I imagine that the hard part would be proving it correct.

All you'd really need to do is to find a way to simulate 'regular' (discrete) life. Setting it up would be a major pain.

And you'd have to look out for off by epsilon errors. Just like regular computers running on regular physics.

Huh? It looks even more complex --organic even.

You don't confuse the fast rate of change in some Conway implementations (which is a detail) with actual complexity.

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