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A comment on Ask HN: What's your best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's your best implementation of Conway's Game ... by orblivion on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @08:23PM (#43031731)
You know one of the hard questions here must be, what configuration exactly is it simulating? It has to be a configuration that simulates the same Game of Life at a higher scale. Any change you make to the configuration must also change the higher level configuration that it simulates.

And it occurs to me, a blank sheet of paper qualifies as the Game Of Life simulating the Game Of Life.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your best implementation of Conway's Game ... by zamadatix on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @10:18PM (#43032322)
What makes GoL in GoL somewhat magical feeling is less "there are layers of logic being executed" and more "GoL rules and conditions are extremely restrictive yet still just complex enough to simulate nested execution of the ruleset itself". When you move up the complexity chain to "person with a sheet of paper" you lose some of that wonder to just end up with "extremely complex system can throw away most of the complexity to also simulate execution of a simple system" which feels a lot less surprising.
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Re:Ask HN: What's your best implementation of Conway's Game ... by Pyrodogg on Thursday February 13, 2025 @02:33AM (#43033566)
You might like this puzzle.

https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/21

It really makes you think about this; interaction between levels in a simulation.

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