
Game of life that produces scrolling text "Golly" - icey
http://golly.sourceforge.net/
======
davi
Googling around to find out if the logo is in fact a real Game of Life (it
seems to be), I run into this description of the hashlife algorithm which
enables high performance Game of Life simulations:

<http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/184406478>

(DDJ article found in this reddit thread:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7t97o/golly_a_c...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7t97o/golly_a_cellular_automata_app_with_hashlife/))

~~~
javert
The logo is a real game of life, and if you download Golly, it comes with a
bunch of patterns you can try, including the scrolling "golly" text.

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vegashacker
Has anyone read Borges' story, "The Library of Babel"? This Golly thing
reminds me of this part of the story:

"One [book] which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four
was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the
last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of
letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids."

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paulgb
Golly looks like a neat little tool for playing around with this stuff. The
other rule sets look fun too, check out this prime calculator using WireWorld:

<http://golly.sourceforge.net/gtk-primes.png>

The wikipedia page for Wireworld ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld> )
has an animation for a similar counter (it's labeled as a prime calculator,
but it seems to be just a regular counter).

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msluyter
Cool. I look forward to being able to print out things like "Jenny, will you
marry me?"

More seriously, I wonder if you could use some combination of pattern
recognition and genetic algorithms to auto discover more words/phrases of this
sort.

~~~
tlrobinson
I bet it would be easier to design a banner generator that intelligently
figures out a design.

It looks like all you need to do is figure out an algorithm for producing a
single stream of "bits", then correctly place and synchronize them. I bet it
would be quite trivial, really.

(it's interesting that first sentence had the words "intelligent" and "design"
in it, when I had no intention of bringing up the evolution vs. intelligent
design issue, I only realized what I had said after the fact)

~~~
nsrivast
What you are referring to is global-to-local compilation:

Biologically-inspired Self-Assembly of 2D Shapes, Using Global-to-local
Compilation, A. Kondacs, International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003

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icey
This is the output: <http://golly.sourceforge.net/ticker.gif>

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iuguy
Was it written by Carol Thatcher?

~~~
davi
See first post on this reddit thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vbai/game_of_l...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vbai/game_of_life_that_produces_scrolling_text_golly/)

Please don't encourage HN's convergence to reddit-style discussions.

