Building a computer in Conway's game of life

Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by dang on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:32PM (#24831758)

The interestingly useless and uselessly interesting are not only welcome here, they're at the apex of the tradition that HN (at its best) helps to continue. A post like this never needs an answer to "why"!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by TobalJackson on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:07PM (#24831572)

Have you ever thought about what life is about for other people? Do you only think about eating, drinking, sleeping and exercise?

I would counter your question by asking, isn't your comment here practically and intellectually useless?

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by wombatmobile on Monday October 19, 2020 @08:32PM (#24832698)

> Do you only think about eating, drinking, sleeping and exercise?

We need more than that.

We need breathing, pissing, shitting, fighting, and sex.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by tasty_freeze on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:38PM (#24831805)

They knew it was a low-quality question and so created a new account in order to post that comment. And despite knowing it was a crap comment, cared enough to make the effort to create the new account. I don't get some motivates some people.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by dspillett on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @06:47AM (#24835889)

The joy of snark. Some get off on it quite easily.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by mensetmanusman on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:08PM (#24831581)

It might be useful:

We do not know how ‘soup of chemistry’ does information processing. (e.g. biology)

The more it looks like soup, the more we might be able to intuit how to tackle things that are unbounded in complexity. E.g. how do millions of cells coordinate growth to make a new organ/repair and then stop, what are the chemical initial conditions that generate this complex orchestra, what tells it to stop, can we speak that language if we knew it?

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by j4nt4b on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:11PM (#24831599)

An obvious example would be intellectual cross-pollination. This project is likely to get a lot of exposure in the Game of Life community as well as the Computer Science community, increasing the chances that members of either community feel compelled to cross over and contribute in an area that may have previously seemed uninteresting/unpromising/unknown.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by monadgonad on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @08:53AM (#24836695)

While that's true for posts like this in general, in this specific case those communities are the same. Conway's Game of Life is a computer science curio.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by soared on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:33PM (#24831767)

You can’t build a computer with pebbles though? OP is using basic Conway laws to build on logic gates.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by zamadatix on Monday October 19, 2020 @07:58PM (#24832446)

What's to stop you from making logic gates out of patterns of pebbles on a beach exactly?

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by usefulcat on Monday October 19, 2020 @09:10PM (#24833025)

Given enough pebbles and a large enough beach, you could make a drawing--and so a design--of just about anything. But this is arguably both a design and a concrete implementation of a kind of machine.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by zamadatix on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @12:17AM (#24833877)

Your phone is just a drawing/design until you put energy into it as well. Then things start to "compute" due to the pattern of interactions that energy creates. There is no law of the universe that says this energy must be electrical.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by xaedes on Monday October 19, 2020 @08:51PM (#24832881)

Without anyone performing the necessary pattern transformations to make it "work" this will be very static and boring...

With computer in GOL you have GOL which will do the pattern transformations.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by zamadatix on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @12:14AM (#24833864)

Nothing about the rules of GOL performs the necessary pattern transformations. You could say the pebbles follow the rules of GOL and put some energy into performing those transformations. This is what a computer does with GOL.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by testermelon on Monday October 19, 2020 @08:49PM (#24832865)

Because the pebbles stay there when nothing knock it off. And when something knock it off we can't reliably know where it will go?

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by zamadatix on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @12:16AM (#24833873)

There is nothing to knock of a starting condition for the GOL until you put energy into it. There is no reason, for instance, you couldn't have a little robot moving the pebbles according to GOL rules. If you say the robot is the thing doing the computation the such is the case of the computer running this GOL simulation.

If you say it's not pebbles then imagine a mechanical computer built out of them. Provide some kinetic energy and rocks begin to compute just as the silicon in your computer begins to compute when you put electrical energy into it.

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by scollet on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @02:20AM (#24834419)

https://xkcd.com/505/

For any passerbys

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Re:Building a computer in Conway's game of life by enoreyes on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:04PM (#24831545)

Perhaps this specific exercise does not necessarily generate any utility in and of itself, but the concept is certainly quite interesting. Many would argue a bunch of pebbles on the sea shore couldn't possibly be alive, yet many still hope we can bring life to a machine of silicon. Clearly there must be some difference between the two, unless there isn't. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/505/

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