Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable

by surprisetalk • 2 years ago

1515 243 2 years ago

Wow that is so cool. Fractal game of life! Is this just a very specific configuration that repeats in a fractal way?

monitron3• 2 years ago

Yes! The delightful reason why this configuration can repeat within itself is that this Game of Life pattern is a machine with the rules of Game of Life built into it. It's calculating and displaying the game step-by-step. If you watch the machinery you can see the "data" flying around between cells and then the cells turning on and off.

This pattern isn't unique – you could certainly come up with infinitely many more machines in Game of Life that do the same thing. But yes, most Game of Life patterns aren't fractal like this.

a-ungurianu• 2 years ago

This is awesome and very mesmerising.

Is the ability to do this tied to the fact that Game of Life is Turing-complete, or is there a weaker/stronger property that allows for this?

Also, does this count as a “quine”?

dartos• 2 years ago

You can think of it like that. I think that makes sense.

You can build structures within the GoL rules that implement the GoL rules, so…

Filligree2• 2 years ago

People have built explicit turing machines in GoL, so it certainly is Turing-complete.

moritzwarhier• 2 years ago

Is the ability to do this tied to the fact that Game of Life is Turing-complete

sounds like GP is aware of that fact :)

OscarCunningham4• 2 years ago

It needs to be able to compute, but also to be able to place cells in such a way as to 'display' the result one level up.

SamBam2• 2 years ago

I'd say it's certainly in the spirit of a quine. I feel like Hofstadter would love this if he isn't already aware of it.

samatman5• 2 years ago

It can't be a stronger property, the essence of Turing-completeness is that a Turing-complete automaton can simulate any other Turing-complete automaton, including itself.

Whether an automaton, capable of scale-invariant self-simulation, but not exhibiting Turing-completeness, is even possible, is a very interesting question. I don't know the answer.

inthemiddle• 2 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978978

nico• 2 years ago

This is really cool, leaves me wondering about the fabric of the universe itself

Could we be living in a infinitely recursive simulation?

a-r-t• 2 years ago

If anyone is interested in reading about this idea, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" [0] and Max Tegmarks's "Our Mathematical Universe" [1].

[0] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/

[1] https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html

hackinthebochs• 2 years ago

Oh no what have you done

anthk• 2 years ago

The Computational Beauty of Nature, too among:

https://github.com/gwf/CBofN

kossTKR• 2 years ago

Seems most likely, but why is there anything at all to begin with?

.. a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.

Does anyone else sometimes get these "intuitive flashes of insight" - like your brain configures itself in a pattern that "lifts the veil".

I've been thinking of starting meditating to stabilise or cultivate this state if possible because i've feel like i've been losing this slightly psychedelic ability since i was a kid.

Most often i get it in the hypno/hypopompic phases, sudden flashes of eureka that disappears just as fast, like a loud echo of "wow this is existance", "time is unbelievably deep", "demensions and perspective are bizarre in essence", "is this just a fraction of a shared dream" etc.

mentos• 2 years ago

My thought is that ‘things just exist’ and the problem is the dimension we experience things in.

Does that make any sense?

a13o• 2 years ago

If you wanna get really lost, consider how the 'aha' feeling could itself be illusory and indicative of nothing at all. Similar to how everything in a dream is convincingly real. Or how ideas sound better when you're high. 'Aha' is not a reliable narrator.

My challenge to people chasing 'aha', is to see how long you can stay in the present moment.

a_cardboard_box• 2 years ago

Why shouldn't stuff be allowed to spontaneously come into existence? Why should there be any rules at all to begin with? If there is truly nothing, then there isn't any rule to force the nothing to stay nothing. So the question becomes "how was the universe chosen to be this way, rather than some other way?". The choice must be made, but there is no objective reason to prefer any option over any other. "Nothing exists" is a simple answer, but simplicity is not objectively preferred.

I think the presence of this subjective choice forces a subjective experience into existence with the free will to decide it. Though I haven't a clue how the characteristics of the experience are chosen - that's also a subjective choice. It's subjective choices all the way down.

TomSwirly3• 2 years ago

Requiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no".

People have tried to explain the universe with cellular automata and so far none of these systems has even been consistent with our current observations of the universe, let alone predicting some new behavior that would allow us to prove or disprove that the theory was true. (If your theory doesn't predict anything new, it's not a new theory at all!)

Requiring infinite recursion of cellular automata would seem to make the whole problem much harder...

mseepgood• 2 years ago

Since when is the universe finite?

Kranar5• 2 years ago

One of the interesting takeaways of this simulation is that it isn't built upon an infinite amount of information.

This simulation is a finite amount of information being used to describe an infinitely large simulation.

mistermann3• 2 years ago

Requiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no".

A system whose fundamental nature can be modified / controlled by ideas spawned within the system itself would be extremely cool.

I think a decent argument could be made that we may be in just such a system.

politician• 2 years ago

PBS SpaceTime just did a piece on the theory of a holographic universe yesterday.

https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU

SigmundA• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

breuleux2• 2 years ago

I agree that this is really cool, but this is a very contrived situation where the entire universe is arranged in such a way as to form a sort of fixed point. The vast majority of configurations of the Game of Life or of the real world are not fixed points and would break the clever tricks that are used to make this.

Also, because the simulation is infinite and speeds up and simplifies itself as you zoom out, you don't properly appreciate the fact that every layer is a thousand times slower than the layer that simulates it and contains a thousand times less cells (I don't know if it's a thousand). If you transposed this to the real world, it would take one kilogram of computing substrate an hour to simulate one gram of matter for 3.6 seconds and that's kind of useless.

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 years ago

Well, we don't have the tech to build such a simulator ourselves, so we'd have to be a leaf node of the simulation tree, that has yet to run long enough to discover how to spawn the next levels. But I guess not all leaves are successful at spawning - some just self-destruct.

monktastic12• 2 years ago

Obligatory: https://qntm.org/responsibility

screamingninja• 2 years ago

Does not work for me in Firefox: `Uncaught TypeError: c[b[k]] is undefined`. Opens normally in the other major browser.

tedivm• 2 years ago

Weird, I viewed it on firefox with no issue. MacOS, latest version of firefox, mostly just privacy blocking extensions.

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

Same, does not work for me on Android Firefox

TomSwirly3• 2 years ago

Does work on FF, MacOS 14.3.1 (Sonoma :-/)

(Some extensions conflict with some webpages, too...)

One day we will get it together so every computer program works on every computer, if we don't collapse our ecosystem first.

kleiba• 2 years ago

Does not work for me either, Firefox on Windows. But I'm getting a different error: this.frames.vb[k] is undefined

hetman• 2 years ago

Weirdly it works fine for me in Firefox but just stays loading forever in Chrome.

nalinidash• 2 years ago

I had to disable Enhanced Tracking Protection AKA ETP from firefox to run it.Otherwise it is stuck on loading screen.

Though it is working with uBlock origin(default settings)..

rezmason2• 2 years ago

I've downloaded saharan's repo and poked around the Life Universe project in Chrome and FF— it seems that the pixels representing the compressed animation are retrieved through a Context2D::drawImage call, and are different in Firefox and other browsers.

It makes sense that ETP would mess with the pixels output from a drawImage call, to fight fingerprinting.

Maybe the ImageLoader can be replaced with a more direct PNG decoder stapled to a fetch(). If I can make that work tonight, I'll create a pull request; this is how I meet the coolest people.

cgriswald• 2 years ago

There's more going on here. I added the website to the exception list for ETP and I'm still stuck on the loading screen.

monktastic12• 2 years ago

For me it never loads on Android Chrome.

matsemann• 2 years ago

Firefox it shows "Loading..." but never goes on. On Chrome the page never even loads. Weird.

kilroy123• 2 years ago

Same in Brave.

nojs• 2 years ago

This is amazing, more detail about how it works: http://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html?m=1

waitforit• 2 years ago

And by the author of this version: https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/

destring• 2 years ago

That’s so clever. Nothing stands as particularly revolutionary but the author brilliantly solved all the problems to deliver the final product. They are only a undergraduate student as well, they have a bright future ahead.

kzrdude• 2 years ago

This is mind blowing; I'm lucky that I've seen hashlife and life in life before, that these additional layers by themselves don't leave me stunned for days.

HackerLemon• 2 years ago

Works on Edge but doesn't appear to be working on Firefox

dreen• 2 years ago

works fine for me on ff/w10

jader201• 2 years ago

I’m assuming this is only achieved by “cheating” in some way? That is, I don’t see how giant pixels can come and go, at a zoomed in level, without breaking the rules of Conway’s game of life?

Still cool, but more curious to understand how this works, and if it’s actually able to pull it off “legitimately”.

teraflop2• 2 years ago

Yes, this is legitimate, and there's no cheating.

If you zoom in sufficiently, you can see that the "giant pixels" are really streams of spaceships, arranged in carefully positioned rows and columns that annihilate each other along the pixel's diagonal. These streams can be turned on or off to form the "display" component of each pixel, which is controlled by other parts of the pattern that do the actual computation.

As you zoom in or out, the simulation speed changes. A pixel seems to undergo a discrete state change when zoomed out, but when you zoom in and slow down, you can see how that change is actually executed by many underlying computational steps.

Other links in this thread go into more detail about how it works. The cleverest part is that the simulation is done in (more or less) "constant time" per frame, no matter how deeply you zoom or how fast you accelerate time.

TomSwirly3• 2 years ago

That is a good summary, but of course, there is "cheating" to do the infinite amounts of work required in a finite time!

The board appears as if there exist at any time infinite levels of cellular automata going all the way down running things. In fact, they only compute one level deep and then short-circuit to using the "hardcoded" rules of Conway's life, and simply pop up the higher or lower levels on demand.

nolist_policy• 2 years ago

More intuitive if you zoom out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

epiccoleman• 2 years ago

There's a seriously incredible article on the guy's site where he explains how it works! It's very much worth a read, really cool stuff.

https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/

spacebacon• 2 years ago

It feels like cheating due to the first generation grid already being a complex pattern of spaceships, pulsars, breeders and replicators I think.

mvcalder• 2 years ago

For the experts in the house: would it be possible for this to wrap around, so the highest and lowest level join? A torus of GoLs? Can such a thing, assuming it exists, have a finite number of layers? Just curious, this is amazing.

dbdudbdiddjc• 2 years ago

What does that mean

rpastuszak• 2 years ago

I guess what they mean is that the "zoom" would be cyclic, e.g. at the same time the game zoomed at 1x would look like the game zoomed at 101x, zoomed at 2x would look like 102x etc...

Totally different thing, but this makes me think of looping procedural animations, which are achieved by sampling noise on a circle (or walls of a cylinder in a 3d noise space).

supriyo-biswas• 2 years ago

At a very high level, this is simulating the Game of life at the appropriate resolution level based on an algorithm whose input parameters are the zoom level and your location in the space, similar to a fractal pattern. So I'm not sure what you mean by a "torus" of GoLs.

adrianmonk3• 2 years ago

Have you heard of the thought experiment where a 2D plane is finitely sized instead of infinitely sized, but as you travel within the 2D plane, if you get to one edge, you wrap around to the opposite edge? Even though its size is finite, you can pick a direction and go that way forever.

If you sit in 3D space and look at this finite 2D plane, then it looks like (say) a rectangle. That's displeasing because from inside the plane, it's continuous, but from the outside, it looks discontinuous.

One way to get rid of that annoyance is to map the plane onto a torus. Then it looks continuous from the outside. It's no longer flat, which is un-plane-like, but you can't have everything in life.

Anyway, the zoom level of game of life is an infinite number line. But what if it repeats and can be represented as something that wraps around? You could think of it as a line segment that you wrap around into a circle (to join the two ends). So the same concept as mapping the plane onto a torus, except 1D instead of 2D.

4ad3• 2 years ago

It can't have a finite number of layers because of an argument very similar to the uncountability of reals.

adrianmonk3• 2 years ago

If there is a pattern that repeats, that pattern can have a finite length.

samatman5• 2 years ago

To dispose of this briefly, the cardinality of computable functions is ℵ₀, and Life is a computable function. Although the parent question is underspecified (some good guesses as to what specifically is meant in sibling comments), no variation on that question could increase the ℵ number of the result.

ordu2• 2 years ago

Well... if we wrap around without meddling with time, it will be impossible. On the lowest level cells are switching much more frequently than on the highest level.

But if we allow ourselves to bend time, then probably... It would be like you zoom out and go back in time. My guess it is possible, but I still cannot wrap my head around infinite spatial dimensions of the field. We need infinity for that because without it will hit the problem of different cell count on the lowest level and the highest (which are represent the same sequences of states of GoL). I see no possible problems to buils such a "torus" but to be sure one needs to really prove it.

grugagag• 2 years ago

Im mindblown and deeply thinking about existence now. Will probably end up with a headache if I continue so

indrex• 2 years ago

This proves it won’t take much to simulate reality.

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

Indeed. Life and universe and everything is 42

xyst• 2 years ago

Watching some squares advance in this universe reminds me of the corporate grind.

aidos• 2 years ago

That is an absolutely beautiful bit of work.

dvh• 2 years ago

ERROR> https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js(37): Uncaught Error: assertion error

nbittich• 2 years ago

doug_durham• 2 years ago

Works on Safari for me.

linkergames• 2 years ago

I get the same error on Firefox 124.0. It works on Chrome 121 to 123.

y-c-o-m-b• 2 years ago

I'm getting the same error in Firefox

state_less• 2 years ago

This reminds me of nested dreams, where you wake up from a dream in your bed, only to slowly realize you’re still dreaming and wake again in the same bed.

rolisz• 2 years ago

Heh, I think my record is three level deeps (dream inside of a dream inside of a dream). Inception ftw.

waltbosz7• 2 years ago

Sometimes I have them at seemingly infinite levels of depth. Also the time dilation feels enormous. It feels like I've been dreaming for days.

jessekv3• 2 years ago

The worst is when this happens when you need to use the toilet. After walking to the toilet for the nth time, how do you know for sure you won't wet the bed?

CHMODX• 2 years ago

I love this. Does this use a technique similar to what Noita devs did, and I guess most game devs, to only process visible areas?

vbezhenar• 2 years ago

Incredible. Looks like DNA.

For some reason I want the ability to put a pixel and watch how it destroys the world :)

mickdarling2• 2 years ago

Adding one pixel at any level is the equivalent of adding me or infinite numbers of pixels, smaller and smaller levels. However, I think if you add in the pixel in a empty space at its level, it would simply disappear. I don't think it would cause any havoc. But, this is not an actual game of life. This is a PNG of many steps in a game of life. The computation power for actually making it a real game of life would be pretty big.

monitron3• 2 years ago

I think the coolest thing about this is the way time works. One step at each level is computed using a large number of steps at the level below. So as you zoom out you are sinking into an exponential vortex where each step takes days, years, millennia to change.

But ingeniously, the simulator smoothly scales its speed as you zoom, totally erasing the fact of time. I wish there was an indicator somewhere of how much game time was going by per real-life second.

EDIT: ...but in order to do that you'd have to declare one of the levels to be the "bottom" level, the one that runs in real time, and that would ruin the fractalness of it all...

px43• 2 years ago

For some reason what really sticks out to me is how when you zoom out, you always come out of a different part of the circuit, so it doesn't feel like the normal repetitive fractal, you're seeing all the parts of the machine from different chronological angles or something.

Mogzol• 2 years ago

Interestingly, the author's blog post [1] mentions that this is due to technical limitations and not specifically done by choice, although I do like the effect.

When we zoom in, we discard the information of the largest meta-metapixel, so it is not always possible to reconstruct the same scene when we zoom out again.
Since zooming in and out can be continued indefinitely, we also realize that we need infinite information to accurately represent "our current position".

[1] https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

Todepond's "Screens in Screens" explores infinite zoomability!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4OIcwt8vcE

"Another thing I know about screens is, you can go into them as far as you want forever. And you can come out of them too, but you might not end up in the same place that you started. You might get lost. Or you might not."

dontreact• 2 years ago

Well you could just say the level you start at is real time and the second hand moves slower for lower levels and faster for higher levels?

hateful• 2 years ago

Exactly - time is relative to our reference frame, so that would be the best arbitrary choice.

sfn423• 2 years ago

I'm fairly sure it's all an illusion.

floatrock2• 2 years ago

My read on the author's explanation story is he did actually solve the "consistency with time" and "consistency in position" problems that would make it a "rounds up to real-looking" at some zoom seam.

It's not cheating, but the trick is it's pre-computed.

Basically the structural patterns repeat, and you can pre-compute the patterns (which are also the sub-patterns), then basically tile the configurations and their transitions "across time". A naiive approach takes a few TB to store it all, but there's some clever optimizations that can bring it down. Finally once a "solution" through the tiling space was found, the author encoded it into a 4 mb png and built a display with some clever shaders.

floatrock2• 2 years ago

The hows-it-done article describes the meta-pixel pattern concept then gives you the "clock-ratio" of the periodicity:

In addition, the pattern has a period of 35328, so advancing 35328 generations will cause the generation at the meta level to advance by 1.

I would even say this time dilation is necessary because the pattern's self-similarity is across time, and if the two levels operate at different clocks, you need to slow down the next level as it comes up to the self-similar animated view of the prior level.

In other words, the structure at level n requires 35328 iterations of the self-similar structure at level n+1, so if you're bringing n+1 up to the self-similar view of n, you need to slow down n+1 as it's coming up to also hit the time-based self-similarity.

I wonder then if there's something like a time-invariant constant, maybe along the lines of the "computational complexity" of any view remains constant across all levels of zoom.

jhrmnn• 2 years ago

Note that this is also how our own world works. Typical time scales of processes get faster as the length scales shorten. Somehow it feels inevitable for a dynamic multiscale structure.

leetcrew• 2 years ago

armchair physicist moment: isn't this a straightforward outcome of c as a global "speed limit"? effects can't propagate faster than c, so I would expect that interaction "latency" decreases linearly with scale.

layer83• 2 years ago

In the real world, there is a limit set by the speed of light and the Planck scale. And more generally, physics is very much not scale-invariant.

edwinjm• 2 years ago

That's because gravity slows down time.

So the higher you go, the less you're impacted by gravity, the faster times goes.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

saagarjha• 2 years ago

I suspect this simulation does not try to incorporate that ;)

layer83• 2 years ago

Since the grid is infinite, it should be possible for one level to to be completely identical in its history to the next level. Thus you could identify all levels with each other to really be the same level. Then both space and time are circular in their scale. (The now-single level could nevertheless still be non-repeating both in space and time!)

worewood• 2 years ago

The most recent video from Space Time in YouTube talks about something like this related to the holographic principle.

Razengan• 2 years ago

And of course, who is to say that Reality/the Omniverse isn't the same way? :)

mglz• 2 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/505/

gregorymichael• 2 years ago

My subconscious reaction when first zooming in was: “f—— you.” They’ve taken something I’ve been familiar with for 20+ years and completely blown my mind. One of the coolest things I’ve seen on here in a long time.

archibaldJ• 2 years ago

i think the freedom of zooming in and out is what deeper level of meditation feels like

computationally, what appears as the experience of “consciousness” is thus Anattā (not-self)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā

gdubs• 2 years ago

This is beautifully executed.

Game of Life must be the first simulation I ever took on as a programmer — and have revisited it over the years.

To this day it continues to come up in my mind when people muse about things like consciousness. Is there a magic dust to us? Or are we the result of simple rules playing out in a grand stage?

anvandare• 2 years ago

As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull, there is no sovereignty of the Self. But no one minds a thought thinking itself its own thinker, as there is no one at all. Just a thought.

cscurmudgeon• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull

There doesn't need to be a magic dust for consciousness, it could still be a primitive compatible with existing physics. See what Roger Penrose worked on.

voiceblue• 2 years ago

You might enjoy watching the emergent behavior in the execution of this 256 byte program - a mind is born [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

shkkmo2• 2 years ago

Or are the simple rules themselves the "magic dust". These turing complete structures show up everywhere and are in many ways equivalent.

Perhaps this underlying structure is the foundation of our metaphysics and our reality is just one node of it's permutative potentiality. The simple rules of GoL are just an emergent reflection of the fundemental nature of meta-reality. These types of relfections within our neural and semantic structures may be the necessary "magic dust" for consciousness to emerge.

MrYellowP• 2 years ago

This gave me a feeling of infinite computing power.

gbolcer• 2 years ago

Okay, this is amazingly cool.

whartung• 2 years ago

So, do you think this was a twinkle in the back of Conways mind when he was scheming and coming up with the game?

samatman5• 2 years ago

Probably not! I draw your attention to a paragraph from Gardner's column which introduced the Game of Life:

Conway conjectures that no pattern can grow without limit. Put another way, any configuration with a finite number of counters cannot grow beyond a finite upper limit to the number of counters on the field. This is probably the deepest and most difficult question posed by the game. Conway has offered a prize of $50 to the first person who can prove or disprove the conjecture before the end of the year. One way to disprove it would be to discover patterns that keep adding counters to the field: a "gun" (a configuration that repeatedly shoots out moving objects such as the "glider," to be explained below) or a "puffer train" (a configuration that moves but leaves behind a trail of "smoke"). I shall forward all proofs to Conway, who will act as the final arbiter of the contest.

https://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/october1970.html

A related question is whether, after Bill Gosper won that conjecture a month later with the Gosper Glider Gun, did Conway then suspect that Life could be simulated in Life. I haven't been able to dig up a definitive answer but I suspect it's "yes".

asow92• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the animations in The Animatrix

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

Interesting to see it's written in Haxe, a language I've never heard before. I've been looking for a "hacker's language" which could fit in practically any niche and this might just be it. With optional static typing, compilation to multiple targets (notably C++) I really don't understand why it's not more popular. Seems like a really pragmatic language whose designers understood the needs of developers.

zengid• 2 years ago

I believe Haxe was made to replace flash. Not sure why it isn't more popular, but it has a lot of folks from the game community that use it.

OmarShehata• 2 years ago

I was a big believer in Haxe, it seemed perfect. The main issue I and many people had at its inception was that the ecosystem was very fragmented. The promise was "write once, run everywhere" (which is what we had with Flash), but each platform you wanted to actually compile on was a whole process, often undocumented, with lots of caveats, and having to hunt for third party community wrappers to do the native integrations you want etc.

This was ~10 years ago, I'm sure the current state of the ecosystem is very different (no idea), but this is the reason why I was never able to adopt it, and I heard the same thing from dozens of Flash creators at the time.

Dwedit• 2 years ago

Dead Cells was made in Haxe.

tombert• 2 years ago

Haxe is pretty neat, and worth playing with if you haven't. I don't do games so I haven't done much, but it kind of feels like "What if ActionScript 3 was allowed to break out of the Flash world, and keep evolving?".

At some point I should really do more with it and make a game or something.

LeftHandPath• 2 years ago

It looks neat. Reminds me of a lot of ideas I had of making a way to tightly couple classes/logic between PHP (server side) and JS (client side) when making websites and web apps.

It came up a lot when making HTML-based forms. I’d define them all in PHP, but the experience is best without a page load, so typically I define some typescript object to send the form via Ajax. I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance), so instead typescript uses AJAX to ask the server for the list of inputs it needs to grab and send.

It sounds like Haxe could be a much nicer way to do stuff like that: https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/

zilti2• 2 years ago

Sounds like a job for HTMX

shkkmo2• 2 years ago

I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance)

Haxe might be overkill for that. Usually (unless youre doing a SPA) you use PHP or a templating language to dynamicly render the form server side based on either data or metadata.

Haxe can indeed be useful for more complicated versions of that situation, where you need a complicated state machine or algorithm in more than one language.

earslap• 2 years ago

Haxe is pretty established, but not well known. Perpetually the underdog. And totally awesome. It also has macros where you can transform the AST! You can do some amazing compile time stuff that very small number of languages support, and the features are pretty mature. If you want a hacker's language but don't want a lisp give Haxe a shot.

zilti2• 2 years ago

Same reason why most really neat things aren't. The people who are good at crafting neat things are bad at creating hype for it. Meanwhile, the bullshit bingo bros come up with convoluted, marketable stuff and manage to generate hype.

Keyframe• 2 years ago

It was often talked about here on HN because (I think) player or part of system of justin.tv (twitch today) was written in it, and it being a part of YC..

waltbosz7• 2 years ago

I wonder how this app is perceived by people who under stand the rules of Game of Life, verses people who don't understand the rules.

I showed it to my kids and they were amazed and mesmerized, but I know they can't grasp the complicated cellular automata that is happening.

posix86• 2 years ago

It's not complicated though

catlifeonmars4• 2 years ago

That’s the beauty of cellular automata. Simple interactions can give rise to complex effects.

waltbosz7• 2 years ago

The rules of the game are simple enough to explain, when I said complicated I meant the interactions of the system as a whole.

I mean, I don't really understand how a glider gun works.

andoando7• 2 years ago

Few thoughts:

1. What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensue chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this.

2. Would it be possible to have each cell be a different stimulation while still acting as Conways Game of Life in a greater zoom. I imagine yes, so long as the simulation respects its boundaries and turns on and off at the correct times. I wonder what limits there are to this.

jamiek882• 2 years ago

What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensure chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this.

Is this analogous to cancer? Would be interesting to see it develop and even if any ‘correction’ or ‘immune system’ type effects happens.

andoando7• 2 years ago

I suppose in a sense it would. Would be really interesting to explore that with different input values and see what happens. I imagine some changes would result in the whole thing eventually collapsing and others would maybe get self corrected. My guess is a any single change would collapse it either entirely or at least break the simulation of the game of life, while two changes might self correct each other.

I also wonder what happens if we make changes not just to the initial configuration but at different iterations. After iteration 2, change x. It'd be like interweaving functions.

Hmm really getting curious about trying this out myself.

Nevermark2• 2 years ago

I don’t think a change with effects rippling out would be a cancer.

Cancer self-replicates whereas this would simply be either fast catastrophic failure for all levels above, or a change whose effect got suppressed (either died out, or maintained but doesn’t change next level behavior) and only had limited temporary impact.

catlifeonmars4• 2 years ago

Why would you expect corrective effects to occur?

OscarCunningham4• 2 years ago

The level you change the cell in will be destroyed by a wave of chaos radiating outward from the original damage, leaving boring 'ash' patterns in its wake.

The levels below that one will be unaffected, faithfully simulating the chaos happening above them using their unbroken technology.

The levels above that one will no longer be simulating the Game of Life. The broken part of the levels below will appear as a faded spot, neither white nor black, growing forever but exponentially slower each level you go up.

jiggawatts• 2 years ago

Reminds me of false vacuum decay.

marshmellman• 2 years ago

But isn’t a “cell” composed of infinitely many cells on infinitely many levels? So changing a “cell” should change all cells on all lower levels, not just the visible level.

jamiek882• 2 years ago

Folks, this is one where you really have to try it not just read the comments (as I usually just do).

I nearly clicked away but went in and was fricken mesmerized by this.

It’s incredible.

hesdeadjim• 2 years ago

Absolutely incredible.

canjobear2• 2 years ago

Indeed. Just looking at and zooming around is incredibly thought-provoking.

J_cst• 2 years ago

I mainly read comments too... :)

Sn0wCoder• 2 years ago

Agree with you about needing to click the site and about reading comments. I always read the comments first to see if the link is worth the click (paywall, waste of time, huge banners, scam site, etc.) Big shout out to those folks who are reading the articles and leaving comments for the rest of us. I am guilty of not commenting much on this platform mostly because even with all my experience rarely will my comment add to the discussion.

I have made the game of life at least a dozen times in every new language I learn and am already thinking about how this is done. Even having a few example patterns the user can start with is sometimes a hassle depending on the implementation. This site has almost still life’s, oscillators and spaceships combined into an infinite number of layers (not sure it has all did not verify). The pattern does appear to be repeated but just getting the base layers is very impressive.

TheSkyHasEyes• 2 years ago

Site hugged to death. :/

Will try in a few days.

hacky_engineer• 2 years ago

If you're in firefox, try disabling Enhanced Tracking Protection.

Grimblewald• 2 years ago

highly recommend the song "darude - sandstorm" while scrolling through.

drewfis• 2 years ago

Makes me wonder if there's even smaller building blocks of the universe. Smaller than Photons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Electrons, Quarks and we just can't 'zoom in' enough to know about them.

jordanpg• 2 years ago

[Stephen Wolfram sits up.]

catlifeonmars4• 2 years ago

Does it matter, if they have no discernible difference or effect than our current “simpler” models?

OscarCunningham4• 2 years ago

If our 'fundamental' physics is actually emergent from a lower layer then we might expect that our laws are actually leaky abstractions. Very occasionally things at the lower level will happen in an unusual way that causes the laws of physics to be broken at our level.

catlifeonmars4• 2 years ago

Does this count as a quine?

canjobear2• 2 years ago

Is this the simplest construction of a self-simulating game of life?

OscarCunningham4• 2 years ago

No. The centre of each meta-cell is full or empty to display the state of the cell. You could remove all that and it would still be simulating the Game of Life, it would just be hard to tell what was happening without zooming in.

mattxxx• 2 years ago

very beautiful application of games of life as computational tools, simulations of simulations of simulations.

you're hired

brrrrrm• 2 years ago

Stuff like this always makes me think: what super structure do our brains form? Always end up concluding it’s the economy

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

This simulates my layman’s understanding of the holographic principle.

for_i_in_range• 2 years ago

Whelp, there goes my afternoon.

ordu2• 2 years ago

Is it possible to build a macro simulation of the world of quantum mechanics? And then macro-macro...

BTW I think it is not possible but what is the difference between GoL and QM that makes QM so narrowly bound to a nanoscale.

ziofill• 2 years ago

Physicist here: yes, it is theoretically possible, but practically impossible because the complexity of a classical simulation of a quantum system scales exponentially in the physical size of the system.

It would be practically possible if the problem has useful symmetries, like only allowing 2-dimensional Hilbert spaces (qubits), and a set of possible transformations (e.g. Clifford+T gates) as we do in quantum computing. In fact one of the things we actually do that resembles what you are describing is quantum error correction, where codes are concatenated until the rate of logical errors becomes low enough.

davelondon• 2 years ago

Oh my lord this is amazing.

scotty79• 2 years ago

For me this is an illustration that the simulation hypothesis is silly. Lower level of simulation doesn't need to have any api-s or system calls. There is no way to hack anything about underlying simulation nor learn anything about it or even about it's existance.

darreninthenet• 2 years ago

Think my brain just exploded

anoncow• 2 years ago

That entire website is something.

cochleari_major• 2 years ago

I find the following asymmetry interesting: if you pick a random spot and start zooming out, you will pass through interiors of both dead and living cells in some ratio. But if you start zooming in, pretty much all of the cells you pass through will be dead.

SamBam2• 2 years ago

Except that even in dead space when you zoom in you find the borders of all cells, and each of those borders is just as alive as any other live cell. I kept feel like, if I zoomed in to either an always-on cell or an always-off cell I would enter into something noticeably more static, but actually each one was just as alive as any of the universe around it.

andoando7• 2 years ago

Yeah I found the same thing, does anyone have an explanation for that?

tschumacher• 2 years ago

Yes, this is inconsistent. When you zoom in 10 levels and then zoom out 10 levels again, pretty much all cells you see will be dead. But if you continue to zoom out further than 10 levels, you will see some mix of live and dead cells again.

Zooming in is easily defined: when you zoom into an on-state OTCA metapixel, you can check which pixels that make up the metapixel are on and which are off [1]. Same deal for zooming into an off-state OTCA metapixel. The reason you are seeing mostly dead pixels is that most pixels inside an OTCA metapixel are off, so the chance of hitting a pixel that is on is slim.

Zooming out is more tricky: when zooming out of an on-state pixel, that pixel could be at many possible positions inside an on-state or off-state OTCA metapixel. In their blog post the author says that they randomly select from the possible options in a way that adds "diversity" [2]. I think this could be improved to align with the statistics of zooming in.

[1] https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel [2]: https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/#fnref5

Snoupy• 2 years ago

Out of all the ways to replicate a game of life inside a game of life, there has to exist a "most efficient" one for a given size and speed. Something maybe akin to Carnot efficiency. I wonder if aspects of the maximum ratio of scale for space and speed apply to all "simulation inside simulation". And does it say something about our reality? Maybe Planck length is the smallest unit of length and lightspeed is the maximum speed irl and that tells us about what we can simulate and could be simulated from lol

blendergeek• 2 years ago

Flick the scroll wheel a few times and it will zoom out continuously. Amazing!

I want this (continuously zooming out) as a screensaver 20+ years ago (or today, I can probably figure out how to enable screensavers on a modern Linux system). It would be amazing.

reactordev• 2 years ago

I moved the time multiplier slider to 0.2x and scrolled quickly out. When I did I got stuck in this slow outward zoom that allowed time to tick and it presented the most beautiful infinitum simulation of life I've ever seen. My gosh this is cool. It just goes on and on and on forever!!!

andrewfromx• 2 years ago

the designer version: https://www.tiktok.com/@alirezashahbazi.art/video/7122391438...

chrsw• 2 years ago

Fascinating

GalaxyNova• 2 years ago

Wow! This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.

cdchn• 2 years ago

I mean this in the best way possible, this is the best mind-trip I've seen in weeks.

cryptoegorophy• 2 years ago

There is a video by veritasium that concludes with this animation. It gives you goosebumps.

wigster• 2 years ago

coincidentally bumped into this time axis GoL animation today: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW

imranq• 2 years ago

Dang this is super cool - here is the github link for anyone to see how it works: https://github.com/saharan/works/tree/main/life

whitehexagon• 2 years ago

A few other nice simulations on that repo, but this is by far the best, and most amazing Life idea I have seen for a long while.

flockonus• 2 years ago

I was trying to figure out how they coded the game in the game, and it seems all code is "running" from the grid's lines..

Let alone they coded it, how do you go about debugging and unit testing such code?

dohello1• 2 years ago

thats really interesting, so cool how people seem to always add interesting features to the game of life

jimmySixDOF• 2 years ago

There is a cool 3D visualization of the game where each previous timeframe is layered sequentially below like roots growing and animated from an isometric perspective. It looks super cool --- nothing fractal like this, but definitely a shared art meets science vibe.

AlecsForum : https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2hoRnFsmQW/

jzer0cool• 2 years ago

Very beautiful. Could someone share a simple intuition how the infinite zoom works for computation? I'd imagine it is computing for only those pixels rendered on the screen, but cannot fully wrap what is happening (especially the smoothness here of the zooming in and out).

paulmd• 2 years ago

Please implement the ability to link to a particular viewport (insensitive to exact viewing hardware)

Chrupiter• 2 years ago

Just a heads-up, I think it needs WebGL. By default I turn it off on Firefox because I have a weird bug where sometimes Google Maps turns black. On Vivaldi it ran fine.

grishka• 2 years ago

Impressively cool!

Would also make a nice screensaver.

ofirrabanian• 2 years ago

This is 100% one of the coolest things I've seen for a while.. It's amazing to see the structures that happens as you zoom out over and over again.

shzhdbi09gv8ioi• 2 years ago

Uncaught TypeError: c[b[k]] is undefined

Firefox

brap• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder if our own universe is kinda like that. We keep looking for the most basic particles, but maybe there are none. Maybe it’s all just infinitely zoomable and we’re only aware of our own level. Stuff is made of stuff which is made of other stuff, infinitely. And maybe there’s life in different levels. Like, inside the electron. Or maybe we’re all living inside of much larger life forms.

mikestaub• 2 years ago

Relevant video: https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU?t=441

banku_brougham2• 2 years ago

Is it necessary for the grid lines to be composed of the little moving things? At the next level up only the filled-in pixels are visible.

banku_brougham2• 2 years ago

Found the answer. The OTCA metapixel is the invention from 2006 that allows Life pixels to be represented by nested Life structures.

So the answer is yes the whole structure depends on those border regions (which overlap neighbiring metapixel by one pixel.

redder23• 2 years ago

With Brave Shields turned on, this never loads ...

"https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-K6BVDSF3MT" is blocked and that causes the site to fail? If so, this is bad design.

rasulkireev• 2 years ago

This is so awesome :heart_eyes:!!

Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable

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