1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=222136#p222136

by nooks • 8 months ago

526 210 8 months ago

Wow this seems very interesting! Can we get a TLDR of how this was achieved?

adzm2• 8 months ago

While I understand very little of it, it is still very enjoyable to read the details further in the thread at https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=222136#p22221...

>>

Unidimensional spaceship can be interpreted as a demonstration of the progress of recent years in slow salvo technology and the various arms that use it.

The project uses 4 construction arms, with the last three sharing principles with the arms used in the RCT15 project. The first arm is newly invented just for this case. I was not part of the community at the time the principles of the first two arms were studied, but let me describe them anyway.

The one line restriction limit us to using blinkers as the basis of the first arm. Interestingly, a small perturbation at the end of some blinker configuration makes the pattern unstable, and several blinker patterns allow the perturbation "fuse" to move in a controlled manner. Various configurations have been discovered that leave no debris but move at different speeds. Some configurations have been found that produce backward-firing mwss (and leave debris), head-on collisions of mwss that transform them into gliders for both glider colors. By combining these configurations, we can trigger a fusion in the middle of a carefully chosen arrangement of blinkers that would synchronize the mwss collisions at the desired time parity at a prescribed x-coordinate and generate a glider with a prescribed phase and trajectory, so that such an arm could create any p2 recipe.

The second arm used is a binary arm, where a pair of synchronized gliders on the same trajectories are used, with one glider always present and the presence of the other gliders allowing modification of the resulting configuration. Careful study of the results of various words using letters "1" and "2" (indicating the presence of the second glider) led to the discovery of specific modifications of the target "anchor" configuration.

Some of them allow you to move the "head" of the anchor stack to move closer/farther from the base of the arm. Some sequences will generate a perpendicular glider. Not all mod 8 phases and colors are known, but with careful "head positioning" any p8 recipe could be built with such an arm. The program used for the translation only used single blinker anchor technology, which produces a glider for a cost of around 100 bits ("letters"). The agnosticisation salvas of the p8 recipe to use only the p1/p2 constraints on the glider phases (when possible) greatly reduces the number of bits required. Alternative glider paths also help, leading to the same stable configurations during a slow salvas. Currently, there is an alternative method with around 80 bits per glider using 4 different anchors deep in the "arm target stack". The code could be improved by some form of dynamic programming by compiling the salvo from the parts emitting gliders closest to the arm to the gliders further away from the arm, but there was no need to complete the project.

The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.

We have achieved an optimal encoding that requires about 7-8 bits to emit a typical slow p2 salvo of gliders.

The instruction set includes a move direction change option, move4 (repeated), move2, move1, color option, phase option. Stopping the move4 loop results in a glider being fired "near" the current arm position after a defined number of letters. The third arm uses exactly this set of options, while the fourth arm executes move1 after a change of direction, further increasing its efficiency. The fourth arm uses "yellow lane" filtering technology, which allows its components to be recycled, resulting in a more compact and less expensive design. On the contrary ecca1 is built as p1 pattern what allows selecting less expensive options during the build by the binary arm (at few places where p8 restriction would be required in ecca2 build). The arms are capable of firing gliders with 4 combinations of phase mode 8 and color (all four combinations of phase mode 2 and color). This is perfectly fine for slow salvos with a p2 restriction, but building p8 salvos requires limiting the salvos to use only a limited set of "signature" color combinations of glider phases.

This led to a modification of the psamake program (transforming "neo" Spartan configurations for slow salvos that are built from a single block). When a bespoke subsalvo builds a p8 pattern (initial call by a single glider), a 0 degree one time turner prefix is optionally allowed for a phase/color correction. Similarly, p2 salvos are transformed to the required p8 phases corresponding to the signature.

There are several other prerequisites for building a ship. We should implement a storage where the bits to be fed into the binary arm and later into the ecca1 and ecca2 arms are encoded. Fortunately, a slow salvo of 8 gliders fired symmetrically into the central "spine" of the track from both sides (the ship cannot lose symmetry) will create 4 blocks near the spine if there was nothing there, or move the blinker from its given position by 2 pixels (east) emitting glider back.

There are a few more requirements to build the ship. We should implement a storege of bits that will be fed into the binary arm and later into the ECCA1 and ECCA2 arms. Fortunately, a slow salvo of 8 gliders fired symmetrically into the central “spine” track from both sides (the ship cannot lose symmetry) will create 4 blocks near the spine if there is nothing there, or move the blinker from its current position by 2 pixels (east) emitting glider backward.

The fuse arm fires 8 90 degree glider producing switch engines “GPSE90” that fire the slow salvo and convert the blinkers on the spine into a traveling signal.

The signal is then fed into the binary arm by a pair of gliders firing the gliders back. One of the gliders is reflected so that they annihilate on impact. The glider signal from the tape annihilates the glider from one stream (negative signal), so the reflected glider from the other stream is not annihilated at the start of the arm. The ever-present glider of the binary arm is created by a gun of the corresponding period (repeated in the third and fourth arms).

The fuse arm creates a reflector (p8bouncer) and a seed for a pair of corderships so that the first bit read triggers the corderships in synchronized phase to allow annihilation (and reflection).

To trigger the fuse arm, we need a target for the arm gliders to be modified. This is what the pre-fuse does. It releases a glider, travels some distance, and releases a perpendicular lwss on collision course with the glider. The collision leaves behind debris (the target of the fuse arm) and launches two gliders into the spine. One of them hits its mirror image and creates a biblock, while the other triggers the fuse arm in the middle.

We already know what the fuse arm does, the binary arm creates ecca1 and triggers a meteor shower creating a reflector on the input signal path. When the arm's anchor stack is removed, ecca1 starts interpreting the input bits. The goal of the ecca1 arm is to clean up the west. It destroys the remnants of the dirty mwss creations and reconstructs the initial bliner configurations shifted 2 pixels to the east (we can't build anything on the spine due to symmetry, but we can modify the already presented content of the spine). It also creates ecca2, the hive needed to transition to the one-dimensional state and the ship needed at the end of the tape cleaning.

Ecca1 finishes its work by destroying its reflector on the input signal path.

Ecca2 is responsible for cleaning up the east. It is built with a destruction seed (computation supported by the gSoD program), which means that one incoming glider on the correct path will cause the pattern to disappear. The destruction seed generates two gliders. One of the goals of ecca2 is to create seeds of destruction of the reflectors on the input path - one destruction seed for the reflectors of ecca1 and one for the reflector, thus triggering the binary arm. The ship created by ecca1 near the spine converts a pair of cleaning mwss into a single glider, which triggers the destruction seed of ecca2. The exit gliders of ecca2 seed of destruction, are navigated by one time reflectors to the destruction seeds of the reflectors of ecca1 and the binary arm.

Ecca2 converts ecca1 into a ship (a disposable turner), which would play its role at the very end of the ship's period (a slow destructive salvo combined with the trivial task of pslmake). (the rest of the blinker of the binary arm stack is also destroyed by ecca2).

ECCA2 should also clean up the remains of the gun used by the binary arm (in the current version we stopped it with ecca1, but it would probably be equally or more efficient to stop it with ecca2) (slow 2 salvo is used there and half honey farm to honey farm slow salvo move collection helps a lot in such design).

The most important task of ecca2 is to stop the tape reading mechanism and clean it up. The salvo of synchronized gliders stops the GPSE90 and the corderabsorbers are assembled in time to stop the cordership pair (as a tool a program was used that automatically combines a pre-calculated splitters and reflectors (consisting of at most two small objects) to create a given pair of synchronized parallel gliders). The glider streams fired from the corderships do not stop at the same time, so the 3 escaping gliders are also stopped by the seed created by ecca2. In order for ecca2 to create a seed to stop the GPSE90, it must clean up the irregularities of the GPSE90's trajectory debris. (destructive salvo calculated into a periodic pattern...). Similarly, the far-end cleanup converts the debris of the stalled GPSE90 into a periodic pattern. Ecca2 must send corderfleets cleaning a periodic pattern (of arbitrary length). Therefore, it must create corderabsorbers on the other side (we chose corderabsorbers close, ships travelling from far). (used a program to search for corderfleets cleaning compatible periodic patterns) ... the corderships were created using modern 11 cluster seeds (except for the one closest to the arm, where 12 cluster seeds were used to fit close to the arm)).

The corderfleet was also used to destroy the remnants of a pair of corderships. The last task of ecca2 was to fire a salvo to create two mwss that would clean the blocks created during the tape reading (this would trigger a seed of ecca2 destroyal at the end).

The corderabsorber for the last cordership is modified and instead of annihilating with the cordership it emits a perpendicular glider that hits the boat from the ECCA1 conversion to bounce to the behive and converts it into a one-dimensional pattern, starting a new generation.

The ECCA2 compiler used agnosticised lane phase recipes and chose the optimal route from the options (shortening the tape as much as possible). This optimization was not done in ECCA1, binary or fuse arm.

isoprophlex• 8 months ago

If the first Star Trek episodes were written today, they could have very well used GoL terminology as technobabble. The depth of the GoL community lingo always amazes me, as an outsider

eig• 8 months ago

Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.

pavel_lishin4• 8 months ago

My understanding (which could be wildly wrong, I only skimmed the thread) is that it's running in a standard 2-dimensional Game of Life grid, it just happens to start out as a 1x3.7B cell line.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

Pretty sure the GOL grid has more than one of those lines...

sebzim4500• 8 months ago

After the first step it isn't 1D any more, so I don't think that visualization is possible

AlotOfReading• 8 months ago

It's possible. It'd just be a 3D visualization and more importantly, stupendously huge. If each cell was a cubic millimeter, the shape would be 3700km wide, and stretch 1/3rd of the way to the moon.

creatonez• 8 months ago

The best way to run it is in the software Golly. It has the HashLife algorithm needed to make it run fast enough to see it finish.

adzm2• 8 months ago

Notably it only fits within a 1 cell high bounding box during at least one of its phases, not all.

syncsynchalt3• 8 months ago

I'm not a GoLtician myself but I don't think that would be possible under the "standard" rules anyway, except the trivial case of stasis/death.

I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and work it belies. Congrats to those involved!

pohl2• 8 months ago

Why do you think it would not be possible?

melagonster• 8 months ago

I found this line in the first line of the first page of this thread:

It's still an open problem as to whether there exists a spaceship in B3/S23 which fits within a 1-by-N bounding box in one of its phases.

So they use the "typical" rule here.

gdevillers• 8 months ago

What are the rules in 1d ?

pavel_lishin4• 8 months ago

It only starts out 1-dimensionally, it continues to evolve on a standard GoL grid.

syncsynchalt3• 8 months ago

Then, importantly, it collapses itself back down to a 1-dimensional copy of its starting representation, but translated.

pavel_lishin4• 8 months ago

Hah, and a forum bug further down in the thread:

Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes.

HackerThemAll• 8 months ago

phpBB which they use for forum is littered with bugs and security vulnerabilities. This one is clearly a race condition, not unheard of.

pkilgore• 8 months ago

So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line?

That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.

Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!

layer83• 8 months ago

See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start...

It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1

dkural• 8 months ago

Only about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.

H8crilA• 8 months ago

Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1, 2025.

Almost 10 years of development.

tantalor2• 8 months ago

How many steps is the period? How far does it travel in that period? What direction does it go? Does it clean up after itself?

Retr0id• 8 months ago

I'm barely able to follow, but this part was fun:

The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.

scotty79• 8 months ago

Thank you for this description. I thought it's a glider for some 1 dimensional cellular automata system.

kevincox• 8 months ago

Yes, that was my first reading as well. I thought "((1D Conway's Life) glider) found" but it is "(1D (Conway's Life glider)) found".

herodoturtle2• 8 months ago

Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.

cpfohl• 8 months ago

Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles:

Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...

herodoturtle2• 8 months ago

Thank you ^_^

NooneAtAll33• 8 months ago

spaceship*

glider is one specific spaceship, but name for moving patterns is spaceship

zahlman• 8 months ago

As noted by others, the title is mistaken; this is a spaceship, not a glider. (As explained in the Wikipedia article, "glider" refers to a specific 5-cell pattern discovered very early on.)

So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here

My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to repeat).

aaroninsf• 8 months ago

I knew what a glider was,

what I am personally still wondering is,

what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?

I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,

so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?

Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?

Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?

I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...

nerevarthelame• 8 months ago

This video is a great overview of spaceships\gliders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yLcsaewxJQ

The level of engineering necessary to do this in 1 dimension is still beyond me, as is the "simple" explanation posted on the Conway forums. But I feel like I appreciate the achievement a little bit more now.

bezko• 8 months ago

“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain

Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like it's 1972 again.

munchler• 8 months ago

Off-topic, but like a lot of quotes attributed to Twain, there’s no evidence he said that.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

btilly2• 8 months ago

As Mark Twain also said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on."

Of course he didn't say that one either: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

flufluflufluffy• 8 months ago

Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don’t quite understand what exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more…

The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary portion, but it would be hardly seen in the ship size.

Using agnosticized recipe in the fuse portion would definitely reduce its size. Better cordership seed and better salvo for gpse90 would help…

Dear lord I had no idea there’s this much jargon in the game of life community. Gonna be reading the wiki for hours

falcor842• 8 months ago

Their free book "Conway’s Game of Life: Mathematics and Construction" is a great starting point - https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf

jancurn• 8 months ago

You sent me down a rabbit hole: https://esolangs.org/wiki/APGsembly is mentioned in the book

IncreasePosts• 8 months ago

Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive amounts of time and brain power to this.

tombert4• 8 months ago

I think it appeals to the same itch that languages like Brainfuck scratch.

There's something exceedingly interesting about how you can model complexity with something extremely simple. Brainfuck is fun because it forces you to think extremely low level, because ultimately it is basically just a raw implementation of a Turing machine. I wouldn't want to write a big program in it, but it is fun to think about how you might express a complicated algorithm with it.

Similarly with CGOL, it is really interesting to see how far you can stretch really simple rules into something really complex.

I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to.

DesiLurker4• 8 months ago

if you find that fascinating then you'll be blown away by something called 'Wolfarm physics project'. it basically is trying to recreate entire physics using such baseline 'graph update' rules like 'Game of Life'. So far no predictions yet but very interesting.

mycall• 8 months ago

Same with Your World of Text [0], still going strong.

[0] https://www.yourworldoftext.com/

culi2• 8 months ago

That's because it's not "game of life jargon", it's "cellular automata" jargon. Which is a field of math and comes along with a bunch of math jargon from related fields.

dooglius• 8 months ago

I searched several of these terms and they are all specifically jargon of game of life enthusiasts, (i.e. search reaults are all on fansites related to game of life) not general cellular automata jargon.

pepinator• 8 months ago

mmmh I don't think so. I've read several papers on cellular automata and I don't recognize the terms

wrs• 8 months ago

Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to experience what it’s like for my spouse to listen to my work conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 8 months ago

More or less like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJk4y9NGvE

johanvts• 8 months ago

It’s technobabble https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w

tomcam• 8 months ago

However much karma this comment scored, it's underrated

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

One exception: You are actually enthused about the topic you don't understand.

Your SO is likely only enthused to the degree that it affects your mood. "So this RISC architecture isn't compliant with ADA-1056 after all? And you were right all along? Wow, that's great, honey!"

pavel_lishin4• 8 months ago

One of the nice things about having my spouse also working in a tech field is that we can bitch about our jobs to each other on a higher level :P

dcel• 8 months ago

Sometimes I feel a deep sense of loss of the old web that grew up with -full of niche interests, unashamedly earnest and rich in subcultures- has been lost in a sea of corporate slop and clickbait social media.

Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL lurking out there all these years.

londons_explore2• 8 months ago

This seems like a great task as a test for AI.

The result is easily verify-able, yet the techniques to design such a glider are very complex and some might not have been discovered yet.

culi2• 8 months ago

It's already being done. Has been done for decades now. Definitely wouldn't be a good use of an LLM-type model if that's what you're proposing

If you look at the placement of Journal of Cellular Automata in SciMago's Shape of Science visualization[0] you'll see that it's completely surrounded by machine learning/AI journals

[0] https://www.scimagojr.com/shapeofscience/

btilly2• 8 months ago

You can change "might not" to "have not".

The Game of Life is Turing complete. And therefore a complete analysis of how to write programs in it would imply a solution to the Halting problem. Which is impossible.

londons_explore2• 8 months ago

Turing completeness relies on infinite state.

With finite state, one could theoretically brute force search every possible 1D sequence to find a glider shorter than the one discovered here.

Obviously that's impractical, but turns the whole thing into a search problem - find the best/a good solution in a huge search space.

Jaxan2• 8 months ago

“Easily verifiable”… Not really, you have to simulate 133_076_755_768 steps. Sure it’s doable. But if the AI suggests a thousands patterns, then it will be useless.

vrighter2• 8 months ago

This is specifically a task that LLMs would be utterly useless at. Because they can't execute loops.

NooneAtAll33• 8 months ago

1D spaceship*

glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship

rtkwe2• 8 months ago

Their own wiki points out they're sometimes used interchangably.

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship

NooneAtAll33• 8 months ago

and the source linked by that wiki https://conwaylife.com/ref/lexicon/lex_g.htm#glider claims it as misuse

it's like calling all birds a parrot

ekjhgkejhgk2• 8 months ago

I love it that there are people obsessed enough to spend their time on this and our society can support it.

Dwedit• 8 months ago

RIP John Conway, a victim of Covid.

73737373735• 8 months ago

Two of the most fascinating open questions about the Game of Life are in my opinion:

1. What is the behavior of Conway's Game of Life when the initial position is random? Paraphrasing Boris Bukh's comment on the post linked below, the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?

There exist uncountably infinitely many particular initial configurations out of which a random one may be drawn, which makes this more difficult (a particular infinite grid configuration can be represented as the binary digits (fractional part) of a real number, spiraling outwards from a given center coordinate cell: 0.0000... represents an empty infinite grid, 0.1111... a fully alive infinite grid).

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132402/conways-game-of-li...

2. Relatedly, does a superstable configuration exist? One that continues to exist despite any possible external interference pattern on its border? Perhaps even an expanding one?

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132687/is-there-any-super...

Legend24402• 8 months ago

One problem is that, even though it is turing-complete, many practical operations are very difficult. Patterns tend towards chaos and they tend towards fading out, which are not good properties for useful computation. Simply moving information from one part of the grid to another requires complex structures like spaceships.

You might have better luck with other variants. Reversible cellular automata have a sort of 'conservation of mass' where cells act more like particles. Continuous cellular automata (like Lenia) have less chaotic behavior. Neural cellular automata can be trained with gradient descent.

Someone• 8 months ago

the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs.

I think people will disagree about whether “Turing-complete” is powerful enough for supporting intelligence but let’s assume it does.

So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?

Even if it doesn’t, it might take only one intelligent life form for the space to (eventually) get filled with it (the game of life doesn’t heave energy constraints that make it hard to travel over long distances, so I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t. On the other hand, maybe my assumption that all intelligent life would want to expand is wrong), and in an infinite plane, it’s likely (¿certain?) one will exist.

On the other hand it’s likely more than one exists, and they might be able to exterminate each other.

NuclearPM• 8 months ago

What’s up with the upside down question mark?

jmsgwd2• 8 months ago

it might take only one intelligent life form for the space to (eventually) get filled with it

It wouldn't need to be intelligent to do this; it could be a self-replicating machine with no intelligence at all - which is orders of magnitude simpler and therefore more likely.

Chaotic initial state -> self-replicating machine -> intelligence is much more likely than chaotic initial state -> intelligence.

(See my other reply to the GP comment about The Recursive Universe, where all this is discussed.)

jmsgwd2• 8 months ago

Your first question is discussed in the book The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (1984).

One of the chapters asks "what is life?". It considers (and rejects) various options, and finally settles upon a definition based on Von Neumann-style self-replicating machines using blueprints and universal constructors, and explains why this is the most (only?) meaningful definition of life.

Later, it talks about how one would go about creating such a machine in Conway's Game of Life. When the book was written in 1984, no one had actually created one (they need to be very large, and computers weren't really powerful enough then). But in 2010 Andrew J. Wade created Gemini, the first successful self-replicating machine in GoL, which I believe meets the criteria - and hence is "alive" according to that definition (but only in the sense that, say, a simple bacteria is alive). And I think it works somewhat like how it was sketched out in the book.

Another chapter estimated how big (and how densely populated) a randomly-initialized hypothetical GoL universe would need to be in order for "life" (as defined earlier) to appear by chance. I don't recall the details - but the answer was mind-boggling big, and also very sparsely populated.

All that only gives you life though, not intelligence. But life (by this definition) has the potential to evolve through a process of natural selection to achieve higher levels of complexity and eventually intelligence, at least in theory.

jameshart• 8 months ago

‘Random’ configurations are going to be dominated by fixed scale noise of a general 50% density, which is going to have very common global evolutionary patterns - it’s almost homogenous so there’s little opportunity for interesting things to occur. You need to start with more scale free noise patterns, so there are more opportunities for global structures to emerge.

triggercut• 8 months ago

3. Could it generate it's own GoL forum asking these very questions?

iamgopal• 8 months ago

in an infinite plane, if we keep adding random points ( similar to sun continuously giving earth low entropy energy ) , eventually, it will reach to intelligent life form, which are very efficient at converting low entropy energy to high entropy energy.

73737373735• 8 months ago

This would require patterns to emerge that are "radiation-hardened", like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Radiation-ha...

pontifier4• 8 months ago

The thing that blows my mind is: say you start filling the plane with pi. Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence. That means that somewhere in the plane is a full physics simulation of YOU in the room you are in right now.

Does that you exist any less fully because its not currently in the memory of a computer being evaluated?

fsflover• 8 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466

73737373735• 8 months ago

Pi has been proven to contain every finite sequence

This has not been proven yet: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/216348/575868

(or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_sequence)

Depending on the infinite grid filling scheme even these properties may not be sufficient to guarantee that every two dimensional pattern is initially generated because the grid is two-dimensional, but the number property is "one-dimensional". A spiral pattern for example may always make it line up in a way such that certain 2d patterns are never generated.

qnleigh• 8 months ago

An interesting thing related to these questions in the context of physics: there was an interesting discussion on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago about why the universe should be quantum mechanical. One idea that was brought up is quite related to the open questions you name here.

Here's an excerpt from a comment of Daniel Harlow (a prof at MIT):

In order for us to be having this discussion at all, the laws of physics need to have the ability to generate interesting complex structures in a reasonable amount of time starting from a simple initial state. Now I know that as a computer scientist you are trained to think that is a trivial problem because of Turing completeness, universality, blah blah blah, but really I don’t think it is so simple. Why should the laws of physics allow a Turing machine to be built? And even if a Turing machine is possible, why should one exist? I think the CS intuition that “most things are universal” comes with baked-in assumptions about the stability of matter and the existence of low-entropy objects, and I think it is not so easy to achieve these with arbitrary laws of physics.

Scott replies:

Multiple people made the case to me that it’s far from obvious how well

(1) stable matter,

(2) complex chemistry,

(3) Lorentzian and other continuous symmetries,

(4) robustness against small perturbations,

(5) complex structures

being not just possible but likely from “generic” initial data,…can actually be achieved in simple Turing-universal classical cellular automaton models.

See comments 225 and 261

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6244

wffurr• 8 months ago

Anyone have a recording of what this thing looks like? I'm very curious to see it and didn't see any obvious links in the thread.

metalliqaz2• 8 months ago

My understanding is that, it is so large and takes so long to run, there is really no way to visualize it

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

There is of course a way to visualize it, but it would be more boring than a Tommy Wiseau film... with a less reasonable plot.

Karliss• 8 months ago

Golly with hashlife algorithm is quite amazing. You can simulate and visualize quite a bit of it.

Summary: In the end I was able to go through full period with the memory limit set to 35GB of memory. Most of the time all the action happens in 1+3x2 straight lines with different angles no more than 100 cells wide each. There were multiple distinct phases. Some one could definitely make an interesting visualization zooming in one the distinct regions at different stages of progression. General shape is horizontal line, <- shaped arrow, arrow with kite head, arrow with 2 nested kites, 2 giant nested kites, kite, arrow, horizontal line.

At first I was able to simulate first 15*10^9 generations quite quickly. And you could see some of initial stages. During first 2e9 generations it was using only 500MB of memory, somewhere between 2e9-4e9 it started to slow down. After bumping the memory it limit to 16G it was able to spedup again until ~15e9.

Initially it looks like 3 strings xxx. First one the shortest, second slightly longer and third even longer. Pattern xxx oscilates between horizontal and vertical giving stable form to store information.

Shortest string starts to get consumed from right to left.At some point it emits 2 gliders diagonally to the up/left and down left. After a while there are 2 vertical spaceships which collide with 2 diagonal gliders. After a bit more it starts to emit stream of gliders to the up right direction with overall shape being like arrow. At the back of arrows the gliders start to build a structure for next stage. The constructed structure starts creating bigger stream in the up right direction which in turn starts emiting stream down right back to the horizontal line. Once it meets original line it creates a new line towards first diagonal at more gradual angle. Thus an arrow like shape with tip consisting of 2 nested kites keeps expanding and consuming the line of oscilating xxx. By the generation 2e9 it has processed first 2 smallest of 3 sequences. At ~30e9 it reaches end of third line and inner kite starts to disappear outer kite keeps expanding. 37e9 Inner kite has fully disappeared.

At this point I further bumped RAM so that I can inspect zoomed in look at 1x speed. Now and probably previously what looked like sharp tip of arrow actually is more complicated machinery receiving in stream of gliders processing them and then emitting towards front in a way that reconstructs line of xxx. I am guessing at this point it is reconstructing initial line of xxx.

At ~44e9 first segment of line was reconstructed and machinery started to get torn down? It started to rebuild something near the outer edge of arrow front. And shortly creates new stream of spaceships along the outside of arrow. Most of the time structure consisted of 7+2 similar parallel streams. Some slowdown at ~66e9 probably transition to new phase. Front of kite detaches from central line, outer corner of kite also starts to tear separate and tear down. 88e9 back of kite has fully disappeared leaving only arrow. 95e9 central line start to shrink shorter. 105e9 central line has returned to sequence of xxx. The sides of arrow are still there. 117e9 sides arrow break in half and erase from middle. 133e9 back to single line and start from beginning.

pugworthy• 8 months ago

How in the world do people even discover these things? Certainly not by clicking cells to set up an initial population then hit "Go". Brute force approach works I suppose.

Jaxan2• 8 months ago

It is constructed by using modules with known behaviour. And some brute force.

zkmon• 8 months ago

In 1995, I received an email from someone named Conway asking me for more details about some silly thing I wrote in sci.math usenet group. Later I came to know more abut him as John Conway. Sadly I lost access to those emails.

Now, I'm unaware of this strange GoL world with amazing work people are doing. Sometimes I wonder which frontiers of progress, should we as human race be utilizing this amazing creative potential of the current generations.

DesiLurker4• 8 months ago

makes me wonder if its possible to get natural numbers like pi/e using a geometric structure in GoL. it would be interesting to derive them from an emerging order based on fixed set of automata rules. If possible it might lead credence to simulated universe hypothesis.

terlisimo• 8 months ago

well...

1) GoL is turing complete

2) there are algorithms that calculate digits of Pi or e.

so... yes?

but if I just took any old Pi-digits algorithm and encoded it on GoL, its appearance would not be meaningful or "elegant" to our senses. You're probably asking "what does the shortest/most elegant program to calculate Pi in GoL look like, and does it maybe have some unexpected relation to other mathematical terms like, I dunno, Euler's identity or... Mandelbrot set?" And then you would probably need to answer the question "Well, how would you like the digits encoded and represented?".

All of a sudden your question becomes a bit ambiguous. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

I mean.... I think I feel what you're asking, like... is there some primal version of Pi that can be encoded in GoL initial condition with as few bits as possible but I'm afraid that the answer is something like "well, that depends on what you mean by [...]"

dvgrn4• 8 months ago

Adam P. Goucher's pi-calculator pattern is quite elegant, I'd say. It prints the decimal digits in-universe, with Conway's Life blocks for pixels.

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Pi_calculator

DesiLurker4• 8 months ago

yes you are right the question was ambiguous. WHat I was really looking for is if there is a way to physically derive PI out of some basic cellular automata operations. that does not necessarily have to involve circles etc. much less so about representing digits of PI itself. just that an pattern that evolves into ever more accurate values of pi (or a quantity derived from pi). this definitly must not be encoded or somehow preprogrammed into the GoL's initial condition. In fact I dont even care if the evolution rules of standard GoL are followed. just that SOME set of rules automatically produce PI-derivative.

the reason it would be cool is because then we've taken a most fundamental geometric constant and derived it from purely graph update type of mechanics. if you could do that then likely you can do a whole set of other things like physical laws.

nilslindemann• 8 months ago

I would like to see a video.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

Since the video screen would be larger than 1 Bpxl wide, I would accept a FHD scaled-out video.

vrighter2• 8 months ago

Sure! Here you go. Open paint. Set the canvas to FHD resolution. Draw a one pixel thick, gray (#777777) line from one side to the other. You now have a perfect render, with antialiasing.

avhon1• 8 months ago

If each step was 1 frame, and the video played at 240 frames per second, the video would last about 17.5 years

cool_dude85• 8 months ago

Can someone who knows a bit more about this help me understand how structures like this are produced? Is there some kind of computer search, perhaps guided? Is this a clever combination of sub-structures, timing mechanisms, etc. that are then fit together like Legos?

OscarCunningham• 8 months ago

Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever search algorithms. There's also the approach of running trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for interesting patterns. These small patterns are then pieced together to build the larger structures.

Isamu• 8 months ago

I believe this one is a deliberate construction, they knew the evolution of the pieces and gradually put it together.

There’s search programs too, for smaller patterns. This construction is just too big and with such a long period. The search space would be enormous.

I got involved in this stuff years ago when I modified a search program for Life to search any CA rule. That’s how we found the HighLife rule and others like Day and Night.

DexesTTP• 8 months ago

Basically, for this specific structure, they had to develop their own "sub structures" on the 1d line. These sub structures are known to create one little thing going diagonally (and then leave a bunch of debris behind, but that doesn't matter too much for that first step, they called this custom part "the fuse"). Then, there is a known technique where taking "diagonal moving objects" created on the same y-coordinate and placing them at the "right x position" makes the collide in a way where you can "program" where to create diagonal moving objects but at arbitrary positions on the screen (this is called a "binary construction arm"). And then, once you can create these anywhere on the screen, then you've basically won ; there's another technique to turn arbitrary positions into arbitrary shapes ("extreme compression construction arm", or ECCA), and it's "just" a matter of making the ECCA clean up all of the debris and build a new fuse but moved over.

Of course, the "just" here does the heavy lifting and represents over two years of exploration, writing algorithms for how to clean up everything, and so on.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

How on earth did they find this? It's akin to creating a genome out of thin air and expecting a living creature to pop out at the other end.

HTHThreee9• 8 months ago

It's engineered, not natural/random.

marifjeren• 8 months ago

What does 1D mean here? It's a single row of length 3.7b?

marcandre• 8 months ago

Yes. It lives in a standard 2D grid, but it starts on a single line.

theendisney• 8 months ago

They found the mothership!

kbelder• 8 months ago

I'm beginning to think a FORTH coded in GOL is within our reach.

dvgrn4• 8 months ago

Would you be satisfied with a Lisp implementation?

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life

That shares the impressive inefficiencies of the Quest for Tetris project, though. For something that's much more practical to run, and can be programmed to do things like print out the digits of pi in-universe, see

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/APGsembly

MasterScrat• 8 months ago

The start is slow as well, skipping to generation 42168M is recomended.

I picture entities playing with our universe, "it starts slow but check it out at the 13.8B mark"

Cthulhu_2• 8 months ago

Philosophically and depending on what schools of thought you follow, reality is just a really complex GoL simulation. I'm sure I read about it once, but if we were living in a simulation, would we be able to know?

zero_bias• 8 months ago

Universe could be probability based GoL simulation; basic Turing machine cannot handle that

HTHThreee9• 8 months ago

I think of reality as of GOL but 3D, with more states other than 0 and 1, and conservative (follows conservation laws, no relation with any politics).

zellyn• 8 months ago

I enjoy the [GoL -> our “reality” -> outside-the-simulation] comparison. It really drives home how unlikely we would be to understand the outside-the-simulation world.

Of course, there are other variants (see qntm's https://qntm.org/responsibility) where the simulation _is_ a simulation of the world outside. And we have GoL in GoL :-)

mNovak• 8 months ago

Is there a video clip of the simulation anywhere? Would be interested to see it

Traubenfuchs• 8 months ago

1D? One dimensional? So it‘s just an unfathomably long line?

In which direction does it glide?

HTHThreee9• 8 months ago

Life is isotropic, so it remains symmetric vertically. It travels horizontally but I don't know which direction because it's so unfathomably large you would need a supercomputer to run at least a cycle of it.

sethaurus• 8 months ago

Oh my god, it's a Quine!

This is a linear sequence of bits, which when interpreted as a Game of Life board, "prints" an exact copy of itself 2 pixels to the right (leaving no trace of the original).

I suppose its job would be easier if it only had to construct a copy of itself rather than "moving" itself, but I enjoy the interpretation that it's a linear "tape" of bits which prints its own code transposed by 2 pixels, and takes an unfathomable amount of time and space to do so. Beautiful.

HTHThreee9• 8 months ago

yeah, spaceships are pretty common (fun fact: 2 spaceships were found on the same day including this one in GOL), also in CA it's called a "spaceship". However until now there was no 1D one (1D is also called 1-cell-thick or linear). Also, you are actually wrong, it is actually much easier to move than to self-synthesize and then remain alive like a replicator. There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know (arguably, linear propagator may be a replicator) but like millions of spaceships have been found.

dvgrn4• 8 months ago

There has been no true replicator found yet in Life as far as I know...

Actually more than one true replicator has been constructed. The 0E0P metacell

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell

can be programmed to self-replicate in any number of ways, but it's so big that it's very hard to simulate it through a full cycle. By contrast, Pavel Grankovskiy's "DOGun SaGaQR"

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=138191#p13819...

only has one pattern of replication, but it's much simpler than the 0E0P metacell and can easily be run through many cycles in Golly.

thih9• 8 months ago

Are there any screenshots or a video of some interesting parts or behaviors of the glider?

I'm on a smartphone, I'd like to look at the end result.

bntr• 8 months ago

A tiny experimental "continuous-motion" Life glider I once made - an artistic take: https://bntr.planet.ee/lj/glider.gif

blackle• 8 months ago

this is gorgeous! really illustrates the fundemental rules in a very aesthetically pleasing way

HTHThreee9• 8 months ago

For software, use Golly, it has HashLife (pretty fast algorithm), can open many types of files, and supports scripting.

pka• 8 months ago

Tangential, but to people who find this topic interesting I highly recommend the book What is Intelligence [0] by Blaise Agüera y Arcas that views life through the lens of mutating self replicating Turing machines.

In the book he also talks about GoF, but one of the fascinating experiments he did is that a "computronium" of initially random Brainfuck programs (that obviously don't do anything interesting in the beginning) that mutate (by flipping random bits) and merge (by taking two random programs and sticking them together) eventually, after a sudden phase transition, start to self replicate by producing gradually better copies of themselves!

He also argues that symbiogenesis (merging replicators into a whole that does more than its parts) is the main driving force of evolution instead of just random mutations, because the random Brainfuck computronium eventually produces replicators even without the random bit flips.

[0] https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org

mnw21cam• 8 months ago

Pretty please with a cherry on top use standard SI multipliers for numbers like this. I can't be sure without reading the article whether you mean 3.7G cells or 3.7T cells. Billion is ambiguous having different meanings to different people and should not be used as a word any longer.

1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

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