

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - ca98am79
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627653.800-first-replicating-creature-spawned-in-life-simulator.html

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chaosmachine
When I read the headline, I thought they had created a pattern that would
generate an endlessly increasing population of clones, but as far as I can
tell from that video, it's just a big ship disassembling and reassembling at
another point on the grid.

Is it really replication, or just an obfuscated form of movement? Perhaps it
should be called a transporter?

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rntz
There's already a term - "spaceship" - for patterns which, after a certain
number of generations, are translated images of themselves. Indeed, the forum
post by the pattern's author describes it as such. However, it seems that the
mechanism by which this pattern is translating itself is self-replication
followed by self-destruction (if I'm reading the original post correctly - I'm
not an expert on the Game of Life), which is unique.

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lisper
You have to see it in action to appreciate how cool this is. Get yourself a
copy of Golly, load the pattern, and let it run for 34 million generations
(which will take about half an hour on a modern machine). What you will see is
a long diagonal line. If you zoom in to the upper left corner you will see the
replicator itself. The rest of the pattern is an instruction tape that extends
down and to the right. When it runs you will see the tape "running through"
the replicator, which builds up a copy of itself piece by piece very, very
slowly.

The cool bit is not that it replicates and destroys itself, but that it does
so under the control of the instruction tape (which gets replicated along with
the replicator itself). This allows you to fine-tune the behavior of the
replicator. For example, you can change the rate at which it replicates by
adding no-op instructions to the tape. This kind of fine-grain control over
the behavior of a Life replicator has never been achieved before.

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anigbrowl
Good summary. It is unique and novel - indeed, as one 'Lifer' said, it is in a
category of its own. But I was a little disappointed insofar as it is not
quite self-contained or self-replicating yet. By the latter I mean spinning
off an independent copy of itself which in turn reproduces, etc.

Incidentally, does anyone happen to know of any '3d life' platforms, rather
than the basic Cartesian variety?

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Isamu
For 3d "Life", see Carter Bays <http://www.cse.sc.edu/~bays/d4d4d4/>

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anigbrowl
Many thanks!

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shaddi
The original forum post:
[http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&...](http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0)

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Kilimanjaro
Makes me think we were engineered, then seeded, and from there we evolved.

But the architect(s) may or may not still exist/influence our destiny. As we
may never be able to see our creations flourish when we seed other worlds.

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eru
Interesting. But doesn't answer any real questions. For--where did the
engineer come from?

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username3
The First Cause? The Unmoved Mover?

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eru
One might as well refuse to give answer instead.

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username3
Negative.

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csmeder
Is there a javascript version of the game of life where we can see this?

