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A comment on Building a computer in Conway's game of life. Parent comment

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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