"Hashwar": A Battle Royale for individual GOL configurations

[hash0]

clockwork_discovery_16x16.png (33.96 KiB) Viewed 416 times

Congratulations to Phnx - for constructing patterns with unique generational counts substantially above the Agars. The chart above shows the currently longest-running Agar, Gentle Hypergiant, while pure_form and las_meninas have raised the longevity bar substantially above that!

I suggest the name "clockwork class" for those patterns based on the constructor idea Phnx pioneered.

[Vort]

Looks like "INCLUDE AGAR" switch in LONGEVITY_CHALLENGE needs rethinking.

[hash0]

Looks like "INCLUDE AGAR" switch in LONGEVITY_CHALLENGE needs rethinking.

I am more than happy to adjust that switch if and when we discover further classes of patterns!

[Vort]

I am more than happy to adjust that switch if and when we discover further classes of patterns!

I think this pattern alone is enough reason for switch tuning:

the_last_supper.png (11.31 KiB) Viewed 396 times

[hash0]

She's a real beauty, isn't she? 12 million unique steps...

[bobinou]

The next question is, what is the actual limit with those?
Edit: phnx really opened pandoras box here xd

[hash0]

49 million non-repeating generations on the 32x32 torus ... I am in AWE!!!

[bobinou]

This is the first FPGA of many that will form a cluster to mine the longest running patterns on the 16x16. This board alone can evaluate over 170M boards/s which is about 4-5x my rtx4070 and 10x of the prev. FGPA miner.
Over the next weeks it will get a proper rack, psu and reciver board, so its not just attached to my PC lol

[LuveelVoom]

This is the first FPGA of many that will form a cluster to mine the longest running patterns on the 16x16. This board alone can evaluate over 170M boards/s which is about 4-5x my rtx4070 and 10x of the prev. FGPA miner.
Over the next weeks it will get a proper rack, psu and reciver board, so its not just attached to my PC lol

Wow. I wonder if maybe you could do some contributions to the G and H GPU accelerated symmetries in Catagolue?

[bobinou]

Wow. I wonder if maybe you could do some contributions to the G and H GPU accelerated symmetries in Catagolue?

Thanks yeah i can def. take a look at that!

[hash0]

I'm gonna score some decomissioned bitcoin miners and put your puny FPGA rig in the dust!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/commen ... operation/

[bobinou]

Hahaha
I wish those would work, there are some banger deals on ebay and aliexpress as well

[hash0]

IMEeZmN8cP3e0.png (1.63 MiB) Viewed 182 times

New Hashwar trailer dropped:
https://youtu.be/iLZ7JotIVwo?si=_6cDnEvGToFjzCPP

[Phnx]

I forgot to post it here but I posted it in r/Hashwar on Reddit few days ago

Sharing a trick that gave me a big jum in band 600 (ad_marginen, massacre_of_the_innocents, link: https://lifehashes.net/hashwar-schedule ... ries_id=40 ), because the "why does this even work" part surprised me.
The idea: don't search all 256 cells. Pick only the top 16x8 half and copy it into the bottom half, so row y+8 = row y.
My first thought was the obivous one: two boards glued together should turn into a mess right at the seam within a few generations.
They don't, and the can't. Every cell runs the same rule, and a cell in row y and its twin in row y+8 see exactly the same neighbourhood. So they always make the same decision. The symmetry holds for every generation, exactly, with no drift.
And the seam isn't a real seam. Below row 7 sits row 8, which is a copy of row 0. That's just the torus wrap of a 16x8 board. Your glyph literally is a 16x8 torus drawn twice. If you've got a step function that takes any board height, you can check it yourself:

Code: Select all

big = top + top    # 16x16 glyph, both halves identical
small = top        # 16x8 torus
for t in range(300):
  big, small = step(big), step(small)
  assert big == small + small  # never fails

What it does for the search:
Half the bits (2^128 instead of 2^256), and the boards you find are denser. A 16x8 torus is cramped, so only really active boards survive 500/600/700/800 generations
The one thing you must get right: mutations have to flip both twin cells together. Flip a single cell and you're back in the normal 16x16 chaos.
With a GPU search built like that, my previous best (for band 700) fell in about 20 seconds. Best result: vmass 60.321, mass 49.952, 799 iterations, density 0.244, roughly +15% in the arena.
The catch: these glyphs live in bursts. They nearly die out (~20 cells), reignite, and nearly die again, and the density caps out around 0.245. To get past that I had to switch to an oscillator clock, which deserves its own post.
Full write-up with code and diagrams: https://forum.phnx.zip/posts/13
In there:
the complete Python script (no libraries, ~2 seconds, every claim in it is an assert)
other symmetries (glide reflection, rot180, rot90, four identical quarters), how many free calls each one leaves, and which universe won
how to build the orbit masks so the GPU flips a whole orbit with 8 XORs
the memory layout that packs row k and row k+8 into one word. You can see the seam disappear right in the bit operations
the cut trick with the exact conditions for when it works
Has anyone else tried symmetric glyphs? I'm curious whether glide or rot180 holds up better for you.


Edit (Nov 8.): a few answers to open questions from earlier in this thread, from my own data.

1. Are there other agars on the 16x16 torus besides p5024? (hash0, March and May) Yes. In a cycle census of about 1.5×10^12 random symmetric soups on the 16x16 torus, single-object cycles of length 352, 400, 512 and 1152 came up besides 5024. The lengths 396, 528 and 1584 also appeared, but each of those is two independent parts (lcm(44,9), lcm(176,6), lcm(176,9)). 5024 is still the longest one. RLEs: <AGAR-LINK>

2. Why doesn't p5024 show up on 20x20, and why no new agars on bigger tori? (hash0, Aug 17 and Sep 5) On 20x20 it can't exist. A pattern that repeats every 16 cells horizontally and also every 20 cells repeats every gcd(16,20) = 4 cells. The p5024 agar has no translational symmetry on the 16x16 torus, so it only fits on 16k×16k tori: on 32x32 as four copies (as Vort said), never on 20x20, 24x24 or 28x28. The same goes for any agar found on 16x16. It can only appear on an n×n torus if its repeat distance divides n.

3. Checking whether a glyph has a predecessor (hash0, Aug 12): a SAT solver handles this on the 16x16 torus. I used one (kissat) to put extra generations in front of my band-700 boards. It found predecessors and also showed when there were none. Vort's caveat still applies, though: requiring a Garden of Eden would rule out tiny starts like a single dot.

Edit 2: for the FPGA people here (bobinou): my KU5P board no longer mines for Hashwar, it now runs the cycle census around the clock as a hunter for new agars on the 16x16 torus (about 429 M soups/s). Write-up with the pipeline and the full source: https://forum.phnx.zip/posts/16