A New Glider Found For Conway's Game of Life 50
An anonymous reader writes "Conway's Game of Life is now forty two years old, but it continues to inspire as well as being the basis of an actively researched field, with computer scientists now announcing they have found a new form of the famous 'glider' pattern (once suggested by Eric S Raymond as the insignia of computer hackers) that runs over a so-called Penrose universe."
not life as we know it (Score:5, Informative)
it's not a new glider in the game of life , but a glider in the Penrose tiled universe - inspired by Conways Game of life...
the article need to be read
it is seriously cool though
As expected... (Score:5, Informative)
Its creation is an achievement because gliders were previously thought to exist only in regular cellular automata, such as the most famous one, the Game of Life
On wikipedia that would get flagged as weasel words (or the whole article deleted for non-notoriety). Who thinks gliders should only exist in regular automata? If anything my opinion is that modern automata thought was the other way around, expecting them to exist.
Note that gliders are not rare or unusual in automata. Some of the first original researchers thought that only gliders/spaceships that exist lived only in Conways GoL but further research a long time ago showed they're ridiculously commonplace in other rulesets. As seen below. So the tone of this discovery is more accurately described as "much as we suspected, but never bothered to prove, until now" rather than the stereotypical serendipitous discovery tone of "that result looks weird, WTF, who ever would have guessed"
This is separate from the penrose tile thing, which I don't follow. It might, or might not, be the case that a glider in the very specific ruleset of penrose tiles is a hard problem. But in the wide universe of all rulesets, gliders/spaceships and stuff seem very widespread. As a general rule if a ruleset is terminally boring then it definitely does not have gliders, but if its not terminally boring then almost all of them have either chaotic and/or glider-like behavior.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/ [uci.edu]
".... I have investigated whether gliders exist in many semitotalistic rules similar to Life, where the behavior of a cell depends only on its own state and the number of live neighbors. The results show that the existence of gliders is commonplace ....."
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/genaro/rule54/glidersRule54.html [uwe.ac.uk]
".... We displayed all gliders of Rule 54 including two new glider guns (also extensible) ... "
Rule 54 has nothing to do with the famous rule 34. Well I guess there are self replicating patterns in CA rule 54 which could be interpreted as pr0n by another one dimensional cellular automata, I guess.
The word you are looking for is cellular automaton (Score:4, Informative)
This not Conway's game of life.
Re:not life as we know it (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure I attempted a hexagonal game of life. It's the first thing people would think to try after discovering Conway's original version.
The problem with the hexagonal version is that each tile has only 6 neighbors, as opposed to 8 in Conway's version. This reduces the complexity so finding interesting patterns is a lot more difficult. The way around this is to add more states.
After reading the article, it sounds like one researcher theorized that a stable glider could not be found for the Penrose tiling, and offered $100 to anyone who did. Some other friends of his found an answer, but had to "cheat" by expanding the number of states (for a given tile) from 2 to 4.
It is kind of cool, or would be if they actually showed the 4 states and the exact rules. Since they decided to leave the technical explanation out, it's a rather uninteresting article. It's not really slashdot worthy, in my own humble opinion.