1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don’t quite understand what exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more…

The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary portion, but it would be hardly seen in the ship size.

> Using agnosticized recipe in the fuse portion would definitely reduce its size. Better cordership seed and better salvo for gpse90 would help…

Dear lord I had no idea there’s this much jargon in the game of life community. Gonna be reading the wiki for hours

So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line?

That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.

Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!

Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to experience what it’s like for my spouse to listen to my work conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.

In 1995, I received an email from someone named Conway asking me for more details about some silly thing I wrote in sci.math usenet group. Later I came to know more abut him as John Conway. Sadly I lost access to those emails.

Now, I'm unaware of this strange GoL world with amazing work people are doing. Sometimes I wonder which frontiers of progress, should we as human race be utilizing this amazing creative potential of the current generations.

Notably it only fits within a 1 cell high bounding box during at least one of its phases, not all.

Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.

Two of the most fascinating open questions about the Game of Life are in my opinion:

1. What is the behavior of Conway's Game of Life when the initial position is random? Paraphrasing Boris Bukh's comment on the post linked below, the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?

There exist uncountably infinitely many particular initial configurations out of which a random one may be drawn, which makes this more difficult (a particular infinite grid configuration can be represented as the binary digits (fractional part) of a real number, spiraling outwards from a given center coordinate cell: 0.0000... represents an empty infinite grid, 0.1111... a fully alive infinite grid).

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132402/conways-game-of-li...

2. Relatedly, does a superstable configuration exist? One that continues to exist despite any possible external interference pattern on its border? Perhaps even an expanding one?

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132687/is-there-any-super...

Can someone who knows a bit more about this help me understand how structures like this are produced? Is there some kind of computer search, perhaps guided? Is this a clever combination of sub-structures, timing mechanisms, etc. that are then fit together like Legos?

1D spaceship*

glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship

I love it that there are people obsessed enough to spend their time on this and our society can support it.

Hah, and a forum bug further down in the thread:

> Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes.

“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain

Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like it's 1972 again.

Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.

How on earth did they find this? It's akin to creating a genome out of thin air and expecting a living creature to pop out at the other end.

Sometimes I feel a deep sense of loss of the old web that grew up with -full of niche interests, unashamedly earnest and rich in subcultures- has been lost in a sea of corporate slop and clickbait social media.

Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL lurking out there all these years.

Anyone have a recording of what this thing looks like? I'm very curious to see it and didn't see any obvious links in the thread.

This seems like a great task as a test for AI.

The result is easily verify-able, yet the techniques to design such a glider are very complex and some might not have been discovered yet.

What are the rules in 1d ?

RIP John Conway, a victim of Covid.

I would like to see a video.

Wow this seems very interesting! Can we get a TLDR of how this was achieved?

How in the world do people even discover these things? Certainly not by clicking cells to set up an initial population then hit "Go". Brute force approach works I suppose.

makes me wonder if its possible to get natural numbers like pi/e using a geometric structure in GoL. it would be interesting to derive them from an emerging order based on fixed set of automata rules. If possible it might lead credence to simulated universe hypothesis.