
Build a digital clock in Conway's Life - ChuckMcM
http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/88783/build-a-digital-clock-in-conways-game-of-life/
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jonknee
Digging throught the Conway's Life rabbit hole is a fun trip back to what the
WWW used to be like:

[https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/)

[http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html](http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html)

[http://kaytdek.trevorshp.com/projects/computer/neuralNetwork...](http://kaytdek.trevorshp.com/projects/computer/neuralNetworks/gameOfLife2.htm)

[http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rullex_life.html](http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rullex_life.html)

I love it!

~~~
ChuckMcM
I went through a period of intense study of cellular automata. It it a deep,
deep, rabbit hole of interesting bits. One of the things I contributed early
was a simple 'two species' variation where the rules for dual species were
encoded in three matrices. I used it as a demo on one of the Fred Fish Amiga
disks (it used pretty much every Intuition window call in the book on
purpose).

The clock has me thinking I need to get out my FPGA based simulator again and
to hook it up to a nice 720P display :-).

~~~
roimor
Could you suggest some good introductory resources for getting into CA? Is
there actually some systemic way of studying this stuff?

~~~
ebcode
"Essays on Cellular Automata" by Arthur Burks is a good starting point. Then
there's the proceedings of the conference, "International Conference on
Cellular Automata for Research and Industry".

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nickcw
What fun!

I did a similar project in minecraft with my teenaged son a few years ago. We
started by designing gates (made of torches and redstone), then a clock, then
a divider chain, then a demulitiplexer which drove the 7 digit segments. We
cheated slightly because the clock counted in hexadecimal. It was a great
father son bonding project, being able to teach each other about minecraft and
electronics!

It looks a whole lot harder in life though, but I guess when you've mastered
the basic gates it must build up the same way. Building it in 2d makes an
extra challenge though.

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saganus
Since Conway's Life is Turing Complete (IIRC), it would be theoretically
possible for someone to write a compiler for it, no?

This seems obviously very hard, but since this seems to be catching up, how
long until someone decides it's "easier" to write some sort of language +
compiler that outputs the initial state needed to do whatever you want in a
Life's board?

On another note...this is truly mind-blasting. So, what else do people like
him/her do when looking for a challenge? I can't even start to fathom what
kind of intelligence level do you need for this, let alone imagine what would
I find challenging if I were able to reach these level of mental performance.

Or maybe it's just my puny brain trying to make sense of it... but it just
seems so amazing to me the type of minds that you can encounter when public
forums like SO are there for almost everyone to access.

~~~
westoncb
Not that it isn't impressive, but it begins to make much more sense how one
would go about this once you realize there are higher level functional pieces
studied in Conway's GOL. Thinking about the solution in terms of just the
rules to the game would require beyond-human intelligence (I speculate); but
if you can use these higher level constructions, it's reasonable depending on
how well you know them. E.g., from his response:

 _It uses p30 technology. Just basic things, gliders and lightweight
spaceships_

You can find lots of info on all these higher level things, e.g.:
[http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship](http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship)

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ChuckMcM
I'm once again amazed at how "routine" this stuff seems to be. In the top
solution go to the life simulator and paste in a copy of the gist and then
click 'fit pattern' and run. Amazing stuff.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I've had to check the Wikipedia article on Conway's Game of Life a few times
to make sure I'm remember it right: Yep, four simple rules is all it takes to
describe a Universal Turing Machine.

How whacky.

~~~
intrasight
Stephen Wolfram postulates that quantum mechanics and therefore all of physics
and the whole universe emerge from a few simple cellular automata rules.

How truly wacky (if true)

~~~
cgh
I believe I read somewhere (Chaitin?) that what you stated implies a
deterministic universe. It doesn't seem plausible.

~~~
Filligree
Why not? All the laws of physics we know of are already deterministic.

~~~
gbrown
Except (maybe) all of quantum mechanics

~~~
taneq
Just because there are things we can't measure from inside this universe
doesn't mean that those things aren't deterministic.

~~~
cyphar
> Just because there are things we can't measure from inside this universe
> doesn't mean that those things aren't deterministic.

There is no reason to believe that non-local hidden variables are the reason
for the probabilistic nature of QM.

Many worlds is another classic interpretation that works.

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kator
Direct link to the clock running in a browser:

[https://copy.sh/life/?gist=f3413564b1fa9c69f2bad4b0400b8090&...](https://copy.sh/life/?gist=f3413564b1fa9c69f2bad4b0400b8090&step=512)

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westoncb
If anyone would like to see/interact with some more interesting patterns
(often with explanations), I just finished this WebGL Conway's app a couple
weeks ago: [http://symbolflux.com/conwayz/](http://symbolflux.com/conwayz/)

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Aardwolf
The code is copypastable into the program Golly, which can run it much faster
than Javascript.

The reason that this is great, is that it is awesome to try to mess with such
patterns in life, by breaking something in one location by locally altering a
few pixels and seeing how the failure slowly spreads throughout the whole
mechanism.

Hashlife in javascript starts hicking up on that, Golly can simulate it at
very watchable speed :)

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omegaworks
An entire society is my alarm clock :D

"That's just slavery with extra steps!"

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igravious
Terrific find ChuckMcM. Only took 7 months to answer. Next up, Tetris.

~~~
david-given
They're working on it.
[http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-
wo...](http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-
of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

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agumonkey
Talking about Conway's. I've seen a small talk by Nicolas Schabanel about
gliders with DNA bricks. Quite madenning.

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coldcode
Amazing. Sadly I work 7 days a week and have no time for fun stuff like this.

~~~
Senderman
One day you'll find the time.

~~~
Namrog84
One day you'll make the time.

~~~
Zelmor
One day we will all die.

~~~
_nalply
For some on the world it's today.

~~~
intrasight
Time is an emergent phenomena - an extra dimension - of the bulk interior of
our de Sitter space. On the boundary of the de Sitter space, there is no time.

~~~
Senderman
Sounds like OC's day-job has placed them on the boundary of de Sitter space,
then.

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ryanwatkins
Google Easter has a nice little easter egg when you search for for "conway’s
game of life".

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Eerie
Now build a digital clock in Dwarf Fortress.

~~~
pavel_lishin
First you have to implement DF in GOL.

