Game of life that produces scrolling text "Golly" | Hacker News Reader

Game of life that produces scrolling text "Golly"

golly.sourceforge.net

35 pointsicey11 comments

Googling around to find out if the logo is in fact a real Game of Life (it seems to be), I run into this description of the hashlife algorithm which enables high performance Game of Life simulations:

http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/184406478

(DDJ article found in this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7t97o/golly_a_c...)

The logo is a real game of life, and if you download Golly, it comes with a bunch of patterns you can try, including the scrolling "golly" text.

That DDJ article is eye-opening in its use of memoization.

Has anyone read Borges' story, "The Library of Babel"? This Golly thing reminds me of this part of the story:

"One [book] which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids."

Golly looks like a neat little tool for playing around with this stuff. The other rule sets look fun too, check out this prime calculator using WireWorld:

http://golly.sourceforge.net/gtk-primes.png

The wikipedia page for Wireworld ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld ) has an animation for a similar counter (it's labeled as a prime calculator, but it seems to be just a regular counter).

Cool. I look forward to being able to print out things like "Jenny, will you marry me?"

More seriously, I wonder if you could use some combination of pattern recognition and genetic algorithms to auto discover more words/phrases of this sort.

I bet it would be easier to design a banner generator that intelligently figures out a design.

It looks like all you need to do is figure out an algorithm for producing a single stream of "bits", then correctly place and synchronize them. I bet it would be quite trivial, really.

(it's interesting that first sentence had the words "intelligent" and "design" in it, when I had no intention of bringing up the evolution vs. intelligent design issue, I only realized what I had said after the fact)

What you are referring to is global-to-local compilation:

Biologically-inspired Self-Assembly of 2D Shapes, Using Global-to-local Compilation, A. Kondacs, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003

This is the output: http://golly.sourceforge.net/ticker.gif

Was it written by Carol Thatcher?

See first post on this reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vbai/game_of_l...

Please don't encourage HN's convergence to reddit-style discussions.

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