Game Of Life Science Project!?!

[AidaDoesLife]

Okay, so I'm in 7th grade, and in honors science. I was originally going to do a kiki/bouba effect science project, but I think I would like to do something related to Conway's Game Of Life.

I just need a topic, or a question to test. Thanks.

[H. V. McIntosh]

Okay, so I'm in 7th grade, and in honors science. I was originally going to do a kiki/bouba effect science project, but I think I would like to do something related to Conway's Game Of Life.

I just need a topic, or a question to test. Thanks.

You can have your cake and eat it too! Have you ever wondered how Life objects got their names? Kipling had some ideas on this. Anyway I learned something new by looking up the k/b effect in WikiPedia. But in Swedish, k is sometimes pronounced ch as in kirke; would this affect the shape of a church?

More seriously, if you are new to Life, a good exercise consists in trying to correlate the algebraic rules of Life with the geometric shapes which they imply. In other words, what colonies of these little green microbes would be most coherent and hence stable? Can they be strung out into chains and how can one forment their growth or impede their unrestrained growth, channeling it into interesting forms?

Good Luck and welcome to the study of Life!

[apg]

Hello, and welcome to the forums!



Try proving Turing-completeness in Conway's Game of Life. That's quite fun, actually, and is a very important aspect of GoL.


Yes, I know that you can prove it Turing-complete by merely mentioning my universal computer, but I would like to see a more interesting proof. Perhaps a reduction to another Turing-complete system? Maybe a way to implement logic gates in GoL? Possibly an idea of your own?

Anyway, it's quite an open-ended challenge, so would be acceptable for your science project.

[Elithrion]

Psst... I don't think that someone in 7th grade has the mathematical tools to prove that Life is Turing-complete

[hkoenig]

If you have the source code to a simple Life program, and want to do some programming, you might want to try your hand at "pattern recognition". For example, figure out ways to have to program recognize "quiescence", that point where everything has settled down to stable objects, oscillators and gliders (and spaceships if you are feeling brave). Or have the program recognize and enumerate escaping gliders and/or spaceships. In both cases, getting something simple to work in most cases can be pretty easy, but when you put it to use, you find all sorts of "corner cases" which aren't found. (I speak from experience.)

[igblan]

gliders (and spaceships if you are feeling brave)

A glider is a spaceship.

If you limit yourself to gliders, *WSSs and stationary objects of period no more than 4 - and of course a finite number of generations to run - quiescence can be detected fairly simply and cleanly. A hint (in order to avoid spoilers for Aida) is not to try and identify it at its first appearance, but rather to look for a point where it is abundantly clear - and will remain abundantly clear - that the pattern has settled down. If you wish, you can then backtrack to find the exact moment of settlement, which is useful for finding exactly how long a methuselah lasts, for example.

Relaxing this to a finite maximum period and any spaceship is not much harder.

Recognizing guns and puffers as well is rather harder, and probably beyond the scope of this kind of project.

Here is another idea which could be built on top of such a detector, which I myself am interested in.

If you aim a finite stream of gliders at a small, quiescent constellation, each glider tends to disturb the constellation, which then settles down again. (From time to time a glider might succeed in "punching through" the pattern, or more rarely constructing the seed of a "Hickerson crystal", in which case the effect of the remaining gliders is predictable.) If the gliders are close enough together, some of them strike the target before the previous collision(s) have settled down.

Now, after hours and hours over the years of looking at these kinds of bombardments in many contexts, I have noticed that it seems, all other things being equal, that if the gliders are close together - ie if the stream has a short wavelength - the target tends to grow more than for a sparser - longer wavelength - stream.

I would love to see the statistical results of a large number of such bombardment experiments, varying the target constellation, the point of impact, and the glider stream length and wavelength. The key data to be collected for the outcome of each experiment might be the population and the number of spaceships (including gliders ) thrown off.

What particularly interests me is if there is a correlation between the "mass" (population) and "energy" (number of gliders emitted) of the outcome, and the initial conditions, particularly the wavelength of the incoming stream. And to what extent this correlation can be quantified.

Why? Because in the real game of life - physics - the energy of a beam of light is a function of its wavelength! Shorter wavelengths mean more energy, which seems to coincide with my observations that targets get fatter when absorbing denser glider streams.

And finally, the energy of a photon is determined by quantum theory, while mass/energy equivalence is born of relativity. Grand Unification!

Cheers, Paul

Edit: What the hell is Unifaction?

[Extrementhusiast]

Stop cussing.

I was thinking about how Conway's Game of Life relates to real living organisms in terms of the behavior.