Re:Conway's Game of Life in HTML 5
by andreyf on Thursday July 08, 2010 @02:13AM
(#1496635)
Here's something I've been meaning to ask someone: are there patterns that can "survive" in some degree of random static in a GoL board? As in, are there spaceships which can fly through other patterns on the board (either leaving behind other patterns, or acting as an "eraser")? Note that they don't necessarily have to "survive" in emptiness.
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Plenty of patterns can survive in some degree of static. One of the rules is "Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation." Therefore, a spaceship cell that normally had two neighbors could run into an extra blip, and there would be no effect.
As far as specific patterns that are just generally resilient, Life patterns tend to be pretty fragile, and I would expect this to be an unavoidable consequence of the game's rules, one that would scale to any complex construction you built.
Also, I'm not going to attempt a proof but it sure seems that for any pattern X, you could construct a (pretty simple) pattern Y than would destroy it.
Assume a slower moving boat which fires quick boats forward. In that the 'bullets' would interact with the pattern first, you have a possibility of the things destroying everything in the path of the slow boat. Could work, but the boat itself would need to destroy everything in its path.
Rendering the bullets redundant, no?
Re:Conway's Game of Life in HTML 5
by mynameishere on Thursday July 08, 2010 @10:38AM
(#1497475)
The applet at the top left contains a large number of interesting patterns.
http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/
I think the "stargate" pattern is similar to what you're asking.