[flufluflufluffy]

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

[falcor84]

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]

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

[falcor84]

And for a related rabbit hole where people actually went all the to the bottom, there's of course the full implementation of Tetris in GoL which was nerd-sniped by a CodeGolf challenge

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

[idiotsecant]

Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder how it is that you get to exist in the same world as people with the drive and intelligence to do truly awesome ( in the original sense) thing like this. I am proud of myself when the compiler works on the first try.

[taneq]

I think it's awesome that they can do this amazing fun esoteric stuff, but at the same time a small part of me thinks maybe they need to be doing something more meaningful in the real world.

[kitku]

This small part is what makes broken people. Whoever reads this, go have fun! :)

[idiotsecant]

I wonder, what would that be, that thing that is more meaningful?

I would make the case that, zoomed out far enough, nothing at all is meaningful, so you might as well make beautiful things, and this is a delightfully beautiful thing.

[bibimsz]

the only thing that's meaningful is having fun, everything else is a waste of time

[IncreasePosts]

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.

[tombert]

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.

[pdpi]

I have a weird love for Brainfuck. It's a tiny, incredibly simple language that you can write an interpreter for in an hour, it's effectively a super-simple byte code that can easily be extended and used as a compilation target for simple languages.

Honestly, as an educational tool, the only thing wrong with it is the name!

[__del__]

for those who think brainfuck is too pedestrian, have a browse through the esolang wiki:

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

[optimalsolver]

StupidStackLanguage is by far my favorite:

https://esolangs.org/wiki/StupidStackLanguage

[Izkata]

Piet is mine - the programs are 2D images: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

Primarily because of the note on the "calculating pi" example program:

> Richard Mitton supplies this amazing program which calculates an approximation of pi... literally by dividing a circular area by the radius twice.

> Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program.

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

[somat]

One of my favorite calculations of pi is to pick random coordinates in a unit square and count how many of them are in a circle. it's so stupid and so clever at the same time.

This was recreated from memory. I think it is close but I may have a bounding bug.

    import random

    def pi(count):
      inside = 0
      for i in range(count):
        test_x = random.random() 
        test_y = random.random()
        if test_x ** 2 + test_y ** 2 < 1:
          inside += 1
        return inside / count * 4 #above is a quarter circle
    
    print(pi(2 ** 30) )

[tombert]

I have no idea how I'd be able to pitch this to a university (or even who I could pitch it to), but I would absolutely love to teach a computability course using Brainfuck as the language, just to really show students how low-level logic can be.

I would probably need to find a similar language with a different name though.

[brightly-salty]

You might find mlatu-6[0] interesting- it’s convertible to SKI calculus but concatenative (like Forth) rather than applicative. It’s actually a subset of Mlatu, a language I created for similar reasons to explore “how low can you go.”

[0]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Mlatu-6

[OkGoDoIt]

When I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech, one of my intro computer science classes had us implement something in brainfuck. Turns out college kids are quite comfortable with swear words.

[josh-gree]

Of course they are ... It's college administration that are uncomfortable

[jachee]

How about Assembly?

[tombert]

Assembly is higher level logic than brainfuck, especially on modern chips. You have built in instructions for arithmetic and conditionals/branches and you can allocate memory and point to it.

You don’t really get any of that with brainfuck. You have a theoretical tape and counters and that’s basically it.

[golem14]

Oh my god, that list lacks DATAFlex!

[d_silin]

Dear Lord.

[willrshansen]

I remain utterly baffled how they made a lisp compiler with malbolge

[eru]

> 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.

Writing a naive CGOL is fun and quick. But writing a _fast_ one can get arbitrarily complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife is one particular example of where you can go for a faster-than-naive CGOL.

[tombert]

Yeah, a million years ago I did that one as a convolutions so I could run it on the GPU when I was learning OpenCL. That was my first exposure to “optimizing” CGOL.

[bandrami]

In the music world there are people who will build whole symphonies out of one sample, one filter, and one delay patch.

[piltdownman]

"So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters" - Tobias Wolff, Old School

[mycall]

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

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

[DesiLurker]

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.

[chuckadams]

Wolfram is kind of obsessed with cellular automata, even went and wrote a whole book about them titled "A New Kind of Science". The reception to it was a bit mixed. CA are Turing-complete, so yeah, you can compute anything with them, I'm just not sure that in itself leads to any greater Revealed Truths. Does make for some fun visualizations though.

[azeirah]

A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch.

It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points:

- "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to complexity when iterated upon - The invention of field of computation is as big and important of an invention as the field of mathematics

The last one is less explicit, but it's what I took away from it. Computation is of course part of mathematics, but it is a kind of "live" mathematics. Executable mathematics.

Super cool book and absolutely worth reading if you're into this kind of thing.

[_alternator_]

I would give the same review, without seeing any of this as a positive. NKS was bloviating, grandiose, repetitive, and shallow. The fact that Wolfram himself didn’t show that CA were Turing complete when most theoretical computer scientists would say “it’s obvious, and not that interesting” kinda disproves his whole point about him being an under appreciated genius. Shrug.

[eru]

That CA in general were Turing complete is 'obvious'. What was novel is that Wolfram's employee proved something like Turing completeness for a 1d CA with two states and only three cells total in the neighbourhood.

I say something-like-Turing completeness, because it requires a very specially prepared tape to work that makes it a bit borderline. (But please look it up properly, this is all from memory.)

Having said all that, the result is a nice optimisation / upper bound on how little you need in terms of CA to get Turing completeness, but I agree that philosophically nothing much changes compared to having to use a slightly more complicated CA to get to Turing completeness.

[jacquesm]

The question really ultimately resolves to whether the universe can be quantized at all levels or whether it is analog. If it is quantized I demand my 5 minutes with god, because I would see that as proof of all of this being a simulation. My lack of belief in such a being makes me hope that it is analog.

[Legend2440]

Computation does not necessarily need to be quantized and discrete; there are fully continuous models of computation, like ODEs or continuous cellular automata.

[jacquesm]

That's true, but we already know that a bunch of stuff about the universe is quantized. The question is whether or not that holds true for everything or rather not. And all 'fully continuous models of computation' in the end rely on a representation that is a quantized approximation of an ideal. In other words: any practical implementation of such a model that does not end up being a noise generator or an oscillator and that can be used for reliable computation is - as far as I know - based on some quantized model, and then there are still the cells themselves (arguably quanta) and their location (usually on a grid, but you could use a continuous representation for that as well). Now, 23 or 52 bits (depending on the size of the float representation you use for the 'continuous' values) is a lot, but it is not actually continuous. That's an analog concept and you can't really implement that concept with a fidelity high enough on a digital computer.

You could do it on an analog computer but then you'd be into the noise very quickly.

In theory you can, but in practice this is super hard to do.

[gaigalas]

"It looks designed" means nothing. It could be our ignorance at play (we have a long proven track record of being ignorant about how things work).

[eru]

Yes. Or it could be an optimisation algorithm like evolution.

Or even just lots and lots of variation and some process selecting which one we focus our attention one. Compare the anthropic principle.

[mvdtnz]

If you're interested in science fiction based on this concept, Greg Egan has a book called Permutation City which is pretty interesting.

[DesiLurker]

I think I've read it or maybe a portion of it, was not very captivating. will try again.

[culi]

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]

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.

[IAmBroom]

I assume there's fanfic shipping of automata...

(If you don't recognize that use of "shipping", don't google it at work.)

[eru]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Shipping should be reasonably safe for work. As long as you can avoid getting sucked in to an all-day wiki bender.

[permo-w]

short for relationship

[HTHThreee]

conwaylife.com isn't just for GOL, although it is the main subject, there is an Other Cellular Automata forum. also it's not really a fansite, it's a bit more academic than what would be considered a "fansite".

[pepinator]

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