[floatrock]

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.

[sfn42]

I'm not saying it isn't technically impressive and super cool - but he clearly can't actually be computing infinitely recursive levels of GoL, so in that sense it's an illusion.

[ant6n]

But it can be displayed, partially.

[sfn42]

Uh, yeah clearly. We're looking at it.

[samstave]

Pardon my poor vocabulary to describe the following:

But if the patterns are precomputed at whatever timescales, the patterns repeat in a predicable interval, based on the scale of time..

So, I wonder what each layer of pattern looks at from a perspective of a prime or true prime number scale digit...

Like if real-time baseline is 1 - and if you look at the pattern in a still frame at position scale 1. What is the pattern look like at time scale of the primes and true primes?

Whereas the primes and true primes are known discretes, so one could think of them as discrete dimensions of timescale based on the pattern represented at timescale position 1 (real-time)

And what if timescale at position 1 is some reflection of the pattern at the primes and true prime timescales... (assuming a dimension simply means the rate at which times flow at that energy level)

Does that make sense?