Conway's Game of Life Extrusion

http://www.qotile.net/blog/wp/?p=600

by brunoc • 15 years ago

94 29 15 years ago

cool-RR• 15 years ago

Amazing. These look like fantastic cities.

brunoc• 15 years ago

Yeah I thought the same thing too - on a larger scale with a couple of smoothing algorithms one could end up with some interesting city landscapes.

mshron• 15 years ago

Here are instructions for turning Blender files into RepRap instructions. I would pay to hang something like this on my wall.

http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_prin...

rgbrgb2• 15 years ago

You should get in touch with the artist (Paul Slocum). I'm sure he'd oblige.

arketyp• 15 years ago

There were similar renderings of Conway's Game of Life in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but by way of 1D-slices through time and grayscaling the second axis. These have the famous class 4 property that Wolfram raves about, leading to the principle of computational equivalence and such godless sentences.

quux• 15 years ago

Reminds me of how the Tralfamadorians see things.

fsiefken• 15 years ago

What i found very nice is graphs of the population size through generations of metuselah's, with my favorite being the R-pentomino http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=R-pentomino

xa• 15 years ago

Monitoring population size through generations in Conway's Game of Life was the premise of my state science fair project. I ended up going further and changing the rule parameters to see which were the most optimal ones, but if you want to see the population vs. generation graphs for the original rules, here they are:

12 pentominoes: http://i.imgur.com/wrO3o.png

Population over 50 generations graph: http://i.imgur.com/TIRgK.png

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the fascinating link. I never knew how much effort had been spent categorizing the various emergent phenomena in the game of life.

diiq• 15 years ago

I would never have thought to take the licence of adding film grain, but it really makes the images tangible --- like bizarre long-ignored government surveillance photos.

teraflop• 15 years ago

I don't think the film grain was added separately. LuxRender uses path tracing, which inherently produces noise that decreases as the computation progresses.

solipsist2• 15 years ago

Cellular automata, which includes Conway's Game of Life, is impressive because of the complexity that arises from simplicity. Starting from just a few simple rules and starting arrangements, structures can appear that you would never have expected.

Some people believe that our universe could be a type of cellular automata itself.

There are some interesting connections between our universe and the type of cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life. It is possible to predict events in the future by looking at the big picture. Various levels and hierarchies of structures are formed in Conway's Game of Life (e.g. gliders and glider guns) that seem to obey their own rules. However, these macro rules are nowhere close to the original micro rules of the simulation. While we can look at these macro rules to make certain predictions, the only way we can determine every cell's state in the future is by letting the simulation play out one generation at a time.

baddox3• 15 years ago

What I find interesting is that deterministic computation (like cellular automata) does not mean predictable results. Vast complexity, both in seemingly random/noisy patterns and repetitive twisting/scrolling patterns, can emerge from the simplest rules. This seems to indicate that a deterministic model of the human brain/mind (or for that matter, the entire universe) does not lead to the unsatisfactory dehumanizing implication that we're all predictable or lack free will.

mkrecny4• 15 years ago

And yet if a system is deterministic, it certainly is predictable (read: able to be predicted) and does lack free will. So if the universe is a deterministic automata the 'unsatisfactory dehumanizing implication' stands. Despite this, the only way to predict the state of a Conway system n iterations from now is to allow the system to run for n iterations. No one could actually model the universe precisely by creating a cellular automata. The automata would have to contain as much information as the universe, so it couldn't fit within the universe. Also even if the builder did know the system rules and a valid starting condition he could only compute as fast as 1 iteration per iteration of the actual universe...and hence not be able to outpace the universe and predict the future. I think solipsist is right about macro vs micro rules. And the macro rules themselves have macro rules ad infinitum. At some point you get to macro rules that try to describe human behavior (which apparently don't work very well). I don't think the cellular automata reductionist approach will help us too much in predicting the future in our universe for reasons mentioned above. We may be better off with macro rules like Newtonian physics and so forth.

barrkel3• 15 years ago

Why is determinism important to you? Why do you think humans would be any freer if they were governed by dice than deterministic laws?

I believe the human conception of free will belongs to an ontologically different category of concepts to physical determinism. That one is implemented in terms of the other is besides the point. It's like trying to argue about Turing completeness on the basis of quantum mechanics.

Consequences are what matter. I believe the most common practical impact of this free will pseudo-debate these days is in criminal trials; "my bad childhood made me do it", "I'm mentally ill", "look at my brain scans" or whatever. But these things need to be argued within their own categories. Either you argue at the level of morality and free will, and treat prison etc. as a punishment; or you argue at the level of determinism, and treat prison as a deterrent and corrective. You can't mix and match categories to suit your purposes, and argue against punishment on the basis of determinism.

pixcavator• 15 years ago

>universe could be a type of cellular automata itself

The problem with this idea is that the universe, unlike any grid, is isotropic (or appears to be). That must be the reason why you don’t see examples of, for example, circular waves here.

mkrecny4• 15 years ago

>The problem with this idea is that the universe, unlike any grid, is isotropic (or appears to be).

Well that's just one hypothesis, albeit one that corroborates a lot of observations.

rgbrgb2• 15 years ago

These are amazing, Slocum is pretty great. But, I submitted this before. Can anyone explain how double-submits are moderated?

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

As I understand it, if the URI doesn't match exactly, or the story is no longer in Hacker News's RAM, the duplicate won't be caught. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember pg or someone saying that HN only checks the stories currently loaded in RAM for duplicates.

The benefit of this is that old stories can be rediscovered by new users.

mcburton• 15 years ago

These would be amazing to build with a 3D printer. If I had the time I'd try building one by hand using legos.

Conway's Game of Life Extrusion

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