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by a-ungurianu 825 days 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”?

5 comments

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.

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

I think that was edited in. Not sure at this point.
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…

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.
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.