CA shower thoughts

[hotcrystal0]

This thread is for all your shower thoughts about CA. I’ll start:

Do partials/Would personified partials feel dysphoria from not being complete? If so, would completions in Life extensions (Symbiosis/SI) or completions in other alien rules make them feel completion-affirming?

[B468S02357]

We could just call him "Johnway"

[LuveelVoom]

Warning: message contains a very-low-grade infohazard that might impact your motivation to do CA. I don’t think it will, but I’ve encoded it with Rot13 just in case

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[hotcrystal0]

It’s more than possible that omniperiodicity is never proven or disproven for certain rules.

Technically, infinite objects are known in CGoL because ones like the barberpoles are infinitely extensible.

[unname4798]

There are only so many degrees of freedom in a cellular automata, so I think it’s extremely likely that only a finite number of elementary speeds exist, because high periods would require too many interacting components to exist for them to reasonably work. For instance, a ship with some moderately large period (say, for instance, four comma one cee over thirteen) may just not exist, and thus any search for it would be fruitless

No, there is a set of finite-state rules. Each rule consists of only 2 types of movesets: left and down. The state number can represent multiple movesets. The leading 2 bits represent rotation. So, we can find ships of any fractional slope and fractional speed.

[TheWayOfTheCon]

Considering the simplicity of CGOL's rules, it's possible that before Conway, some group of kids, or group of cavemen, independently came up with the concept of Life or something similar as a game. So maybe some common patterns in Life, or related CA, would not have been discovered by Conway or his team.

[MDA]

Considering the simplicity of CGOL's rules, it's possible that before Conway, some group of kids, or group of cavemen, independently came up with the concept of Life or something similar as a game. So maybe some common patterns in Life, or related CA, would not have been discovered by Conway or his team.

Related discussion:

Why didn't Life-like cellular automata get invented much earlier? The rules are incredibly simple, and it doesn't need computers to play.

This is a really good question that I want to bring up again (mostly because I've been wondering the same thing). I half-expect we'll find a medieval scroll with a drawing of a glider sometime or another. […]

[TheWayOfTheCon]

Related discussion:

From that:

Moreover, the laws of CA are consistent throughout the universe. So we may receive a radio message containing a (13, 7)c/42 in CGoL...

Could transmissions of very rare/hard-to-find patterns in cellular automata be a decent way of telling aliens "we have pretty good computers"?

[NNlk05]

Moreover, the laws of CA are consistent throughout the universe. So we may receive a radio message containing a (13, 7)c/42 in CGoL...

Could transmissions of very rare/hard-to-find patterns in cellular automata be a decent way of telling aliens "we have pretty good computers"?

It may be... the only better alternative I think of right now is the zeros of the Reiman Zeta function and the digits of the fine-structure constant (since its unitless)

[hotcrystal0]

Of course, conductive proceeded to instantly die, as happens to 90% of interesting rules

Why is it that Life seems to have so many more things that just… coincidentally work, than any other rule? See, for example, transparent block and beehive for the Herschel, half-baked knightship reaction, three blocks reflector, long boat spin, traffic stop, et cetera, et cetera…

Is it because it’s been investigated so much? Is it that Life’s dynamics (a very close-to-optimally-interesting mix of discrete chaotic reactions) lend themselves naturally to coincidences like that? Is it because it’s a totalistic rule and so has more ways to create common objects?

I kind of maybe have a guess on why Life and Travelling Ts are so persistent yet every rule we thought would be “the next rule” ended up failing after a short burst of activity.

Think about this. When Conway’s group first investigated CGoL, I doubt they saw anything really interesting (though maybe it was interesting to them since I’m looking at this through modern lens, I don’t know), but still continued to investigate. Then eventually, some slightly more interesting patterns, such as the Gosper glider gun, were found, but activity never stopped. TTs followed a similar path, starting with relatively uninteresting patterns, and while the thread got close to dying several times, I don’t think it went off the first page of the OCA subforum ever since it was created. Eventually, with enough investigation, various interesting patterns were found, though at a much faster pace because we’re applying what we know about CGoL and other CA to find new patterns. The thing in common is that both CGoL and TTs managed to overcome the initial hurdle of “no immediately interesting patterns” and were forced to be interesting simply because of persistence. A good analogy would be that CGoL and TTs are slowly expanding gold mines that keep on bringing more gold in bits, while engineered rules that were thought to become “the next rule” are more like very aggressively expanding gold mines where 50% of the gold has already been taken at the start and people have to work with the leftovers.

TL;DR: Rules interesting at the start almost always die out; rules uninteresting at the start persist if they are kept afloat for long enough during initial development.

[TheWayOfTheCon]

A lot of stuff

This. While I don't investigate a wide variety of rules, I never had much interest in the heavily-engineered rules with all the cool things available with a handful of cells, because those always seemed to die out abruptly. A rule like that is just not interesting enough beyond what it was made to be interesting for.

It's like spending 80% of a movie's budget on the first ten or so minutes just to get the audience's attention; when they watch past that, they'll get bored and probably leave.

There is a balance an engineered rule should make, between having some main interesting things and the potential for more minor interesting things.

[TheWayOfTheCon]

Could vacuum be considered an agar?

[yyh_baboon]

A lot of stuff

Additional stuff

Agree. I think the heavily-engineered rules don't get lasting development because they are engineered too much for just a small portion of all possible stuff. For example I have some rules with a giant-period spaceship, but they are completely uninteresting except having that 1 spaceship(in fact I designed it that way to eliminate possible nuisance by making most common evolutionary sequences converge).
However I think heavily engineered rulespaces are still pretty interesting(e.g. amoebas, mealworms, spinning vortices) because stuff can be very different across rules.