I drifted into the Conway's Life research community in 2001 when I won a small cash prize for a lucky discovery of something called a "boojum reflector". My involvement has gradually snowballed since then. Off and on I've helped maintain various Life-related mailing lists and blogs, the Life Lexicon, and more recently the conwaylife.com forums and LifeWiki.
Another thing I stumbled into was helping Nathaniel Johnson complete an improbably thorough 480-page Conway's Life textbook, with end-of-chapter exercises and everything. The book could be used to teach a college-level class on the subject. https://conwaylife.com/book/ has a free PDF download for the book.
So... I'm not the cleverest Lifenthusiast by a long shot, but for a random question about the Game of Life, I'm more likely to know something about it than at least 99.9999% of the world's population. Ask me anything!
Two questions:
1) How are people building things this complex? Are there open source libraries and toolkits for this - building blocks for chunks of functionality that can be assembled?
2) For you, what are the most interesting, impressive and varied things that you've seen with Life? Is it just these increasing levels of complexity, or maybe something else?
But at the moment, pretty much all we have is tools to copy and paste rectangular sections of patterns at the cell level -- plus we've got good scripting tools (in Golly) that can be used to string together whatever pieces we might want, but it's up to individual pattern-builders to write those scripts for each specific purpose.
So our "library" is pretty much just the LifeWiki and a few other pattern repositories, and we borrow liberally from existing large constructions -- but when we're building something new, we usually just build flat bitmaps, not anything with built-in annotations or metadata.
Question 2: The thing that's been the most interesting to me in the last decade or so is the increase in collaboration. Projects used to be done by just one person more often than not -- but now a very large fraction of the biggest discoveries are completed via a large group effort over the course of a few weeks or month. One big recent example has been the RCT fixed-cost universal glider synthesis project, which needed contributions from quite a few people to solve all of the tricky little sub-problems:
I'm currently finishing up my OU MSc and the project I picked was specifically around cellular automata - only in this case relating to them calculating any arbitary automatic sequence - which are sequences you can create from finite state machines - that really opened my eyes to the fact these sorts of very, very simple machines can, with the right (and rather complex) setup, be made to do pretty much whatever you want from a computational PoV. In that paper by Rowland and Yassawi they give a constructive proof to calculate the required update rules for a CA that outputs any particular automatic sequence. That itself gives some hints at some ways of deriving the input and rules for these systems to do some particular job. [2]
I know Wolfram often gets dunked on for ego/hubris but in Chapter 11 of a New Kind Of Science he goes into how the Rule 110 CA can be setup to "calculate" (output) other CAs. From there it starts to become a little less mysterious that these systems can generate behaviour you could imagine running on a CPU of some sort.[3]
[1] https://mirror.explodie.org/universality_in_elementary_cellu...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6008
[3] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-11--the-notion-of-co...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
And generalizing Games from there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-like_cellular_automaton
Question #1: How far has Lifeology(?) advanced since 2001, for people similar to your younger self (without awesome skills, or huge time investment) to have a chance at making their own lucky discoveries, and becoming modest Somebodies in the community?
Question #2: How highly (or otherwise) would you rate Wikipedia's articles on Conway's Game of Life, and closely-related topics?
There are definitely areas that haven't really been explored fully yet, like the use of SAT solvers in new and inventive ways to tackle difficult Life problems that are currently just beyond our reach.
Just for example, there's the problem of finding a fast elbow for a 2c/3 "signal wire" --
It's not clear if SAT solvers can be applied usefully to glider synthesis questions, like "is it possible to collide gliders to build a Sir Robin spaceship?" At the moment that particular question seems way beyond reach, but maybe in a few years we'll be running an AI that is experimentally setting up new SAT solver problems, and something will pop up that we just haven't managed to think of yet.Question 2: Wikipedia's articles tend to be very good quality -- partly because if they weren't, there are a lot of Lifenthusiasts with some experience maintaining the LifeWiki who would immediately go and fix any technical errors that might show up on Wikipedia. But the really detailed documentation on Life is definitely kept in the LifeWiki, not on Wikipedia:
The project has at least one unnecessary extra layer of abstraction in it, but somehow nobody has quite gotten around to rebuilding it 100x smaller. A "HashLife-friendly" version could run thousands of times more quickly in Golly.
Since then, several people have invented their own independent computer architectures in Conway's Life, so that kind of experimentation is still going on. See, e.g.,
This is kind of true in all academic publishing, that your success is due to your publications’ ability to inspire follow-up publications. But for abstract mathematics the “street cred” follows three rules: you get more cred based on,
• the wimpier the building blocks look
• the larger and more complex the structures you can build with them
• the more memorable or intuitive the blocks are (so like marketing... SK-calculus is the same as lambda calculus but lambda can say “I am the abstract mathematics of template substitution!” while SK-calculus can't, directly.)
All a way to say that the field is full of “fun little toys” and the key about criterion (2) is that we have figured out how to build structures of arbitrary complexity in Life, because we have discovered it is Turing-complete. It therefore is also NP-hard and a lot of other good stuff. Really revitalized work into cellular automata by giving some good marketing, which led to Stephen Wolfram's success etc etc.
> which led to Stephen Wolfram's success etc etc.
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science takes the idea a bit too far, in my opinion. It's an exposition of the hypothesis that the underlying stratum of life and the universe is, like cellular automatons, discrete—and therefore can be understood in terms of discrete processes, which he views as analogous to real life. He points to emergence in cellular automatons as evidence that an analogous emergent phenomenon was the reason biological life came into existence.
Mathematically and philosophically, it's a very interesting idea, but I'd hope that at this stage in scientific history, we'd understand that step 2 to validating an interesting hypothesis is testing it.
In fact, the game of life is Turing complete -- you can build whole processors[0] or programming languages in it. You can even implement the game of life in the game of life. Someone did that and implemented infinite zooming between GOL levels.[1]
[0] https://github.com/nicolasloizeau/scalable-gol-computer
[1] https://oimo.io/works/life/
It's a fun toy because it's implemented in pixels with arbitrary rules, but the concept is exportable to other domains.
The eeriness of it I think comes from that we still don't understand a lot about the world - concepts like consciousness, the origin of the universe, origin of life - or, any mystery where we don't understand how a whole became greater than the sum of its parts - when you see a model like this, it shows visually how such unknown complexities probably originated in far simpler forms.
When I see those epic Game of Life videos where there's a giant stealth bomber looking structure steaming across the screen creating sub-processes in its wake, to me it's like a blue whale moving through the ocean, or a vast alien spaceship silently yet steadily barreling through the void of space.
There's an ominous intelligence that seems to emerge out of what was once simple, binary, unconscious, incapable.
The local update rules provide an analogy to our universe with a kind of built in "speed of light" of how fast information can propagate in the system. Further, since there is a system clock of sorts, the system is massively parallel with further analogies to our universe.
The game looks like a toy but note that many profound models are also "toy-like". Ising systems, precolation models, Bethe lattices, self avoiding walks, etc. all provide seeding grounds for deep insights into our physical world. Just as an aside, I heard a quote, which I can't find anywhere, about how Maxwell playing with magnets could have been considered him playing with frivolous toys but his setup was critical to him figuring out the underlying mechanics of electromagnetism.
On one hand, I sort of agree that there's a lot of uninteresting exploration but on the other hand, taking a step back, GoL research is exploring the more general space of cellular automata and how it could potentially map to real world simulation. For example, how small can a system be before it can do arbitrary computation? Can all patterns emerge eventually (no, garden of eden style patterns)? What do rotationally invariant patterns looks like? Can you "copy" arbitrary patterns from some setup? If so, how fast? Is it dependent on how big it is, or how complex it is? etc. GoL provides a sandbox in order to answer these questions and potentially give insight into other systems as well.
In my opinion, one of the reasons for the popularity of GoL is because it was created right when computers became commodities, allowing hackers, amateur mathematicians and others to program something simple, that could be heavily optimized for limited hardware, and create intricate and complex behavior. There was a quote somewhere, that I'm also having trouble finding, about how, at one point, GoL simulations accounted for a significant portion of wasted compute.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Undeci...
God doesn’t play the GoL.
That absolutely sounds like a codename from one of cstross's Laundry Files novels. (I think "boojum" was actually part of one, but I don't recall which.)
edit: found it, it was from A Colder War, which is a great novellette: https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
There's some debate whether it was the Game of Life or some other automata, but I remember the sounds of the relays clacking and the light bulbs humming so distinctly. It certainly had a "Game of Life vibe".
Are you aware of this art installation? Ever seen it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xzypl/something_i...
https://imgur.com/gallery/3zwVKc3
It does seem like the kind of thing I might have been drawn into staring at for hours and/or playing around with, kind of like the marble perpetual-motion machine I remember from a Toronto museum at around the same time period.
Why do you think that is?
Edit: This is the video I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA
I've played around with several CAs and Conway's rules stands out to me as one of the most interesting still, for many reasons (like simplicity, interesting patterns, long lived structures).
I think that’s partly the nature of pure researchers. They usually have something more interesting to them than what they got famous for, and they probably don’t want to lead an organization. This is different from BDFLs like Guido van Rossum and Rich Hickey. Neither type is good or bad, and I appreciate them all.
1. There was a two-player game called The Immigration Game [1] using GoL rules. Has anyone actually played this? Even better, has anyone developed an AI to play it? Is there really much of a game there?
2. The PSA: The Immigration Game was described in Lifeline, a 1970's era (typewritten!) newsletter about GoL. I managed to obtain a set of them. I've been planning to scan them and make them available online. I don't think there is any ground breaking info in them, after all, folk were programming on mainframes (surreptitiously).
[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129088/the-immigration-g...
It seems to be rather difficult to convert cellular automata into any kind of playable game. If it's an arcade game then it's usually too arbitrary, and if it's a puzzle game then it's usually way too easy or way too difficult. There have been some good efforts, but they're mostly only playable by dedicated Lifenthusiasts, and that's ... well... not a very large market!
Re: the LIFELINE public service announcement -- no need to do the scanning and online-ing. That's been done already, though there's still some review and typing-up work left for someone to do: