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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... |
> 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.