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btillyyesterday at 8:32 PM1 replyview on HN

You can change "might not" to "have not".

The Game of Life is Turing complete. And therefore a complete analysis of how to write programs in it would imply a solution to the Halting problem. Which is impossible.


Replies

londons_exploreyesterday at 10:45 PM

Turing completeness relies on infinite state.

With finite state, one could theoretically brute force search every possible 1D sequence to find a glider shorter than the one discovered here.

Obviously that's impractical, but turns the whole thing into a search problem - find the best/a good solution in a huge search space.