ConwayLife.com

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?

We could just call him "Johnway"

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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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.

LuveelVoom wrote: April 11th, 2026, 5:28 pm 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.

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.

TheWayOfTheCon wrote: October 13th, 2026, 2:18 pm 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:

NNlk05 wrote: September 26th, 2026, 12:27 pm

KittyTac wrote: December 22nd, 2017, 9:38 pm 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. […]

MDA wrote: October 13th, 2026, 2:57 pm Related discussion:

From that:

NNlk05 wrote: September 26th, 2026, 12:27 pm 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"?

TheWayOfTheCon wrote: October 13th, 2026, 3:15 pm

NNlk05 wrote: September 26th, 2026, 12:27 pm 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)