ConwayLife.com

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

BTW, the correct abbreviation for "kilobyte" is KB, not KiB. Well, that's partly correct. KiB stands for " kibibyte ", a fairly recent designation that emphasises specifically the fact that what has classically been called a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes, not 1000. The recommended abbreviation fo...

There are some instructions over here . What you basically want is to set Generations to 46 (that seems to be the period of the oscillator, right?), then maybe get a little extra margin around the border by setting Height to 40 (that is, the box is 40 cells tall) and Y Offset to 3 (so the oscillator...

I've noticed that spam tends to disappear fairly quickly, but this must mean someone is spending quite a bit of time watching for it. Which can get to be quite a drag. I have all the sections set to notify me by email when there's a new post (the notification usually arrives pretty quickly, althoug...

For the record, I usually catch the spam within a half hour. calcyman's suggestion there followed the one time in several days that I was distracted for a (long) while

At the expense of making the script even longer, we could maybe add something like if(zz.indexOf("x")>-1)zz=zz.slice(zz.indexOf("\n")); Except that doesn't seem work for a reason I can't seem to figure out. The idea being that if there's an "x" in the string it reads, we should remove the first line...

Ah, makes sense! I've been meaning to look over that and be helpful, but seem to constantly have other random (equally non-vital) thing to do >.<

Wait, what happened to v1.02-1.03? Also, the front page still only has the 1.01 file as far as I can see

Come up where exactly? If you're pasting an RLE file into Golly, you need to make sure that at least the first line (the one with x=123,y=321) doesn't have spaces in front of it. It doesn't seem to parse them too well. And if that guess is off, please elaborate

Ah, my apologies, I had for some reason (again >.>) assumed that restriction.

In a neighbourhood of size n , where each cell can take one of x states, the number of possible rules is: rules = x ^ (x ^ n) So for the Moore neighbourhood with 2 states (on which Life is defined), there are 2 ^ (2 ^ 9) = 2^512 rules. What? How do you figure? Consider our usual notation for rules:...

You can have a cell be born or not for each of 9 different numbers of neighbours and to survive or not for each of the 9. So, the total number of different rules is 2^18=262144. Although a lot of them are of course very similar.

Nath mentioned at one point that it was an arbitrary limit he set (and that it used to be 25). Presumably below that the frequencies/rankings just become pretty arbitrary, statistically speaking. Although I guess with the confidence intervals in place, it might be okay to just deal with all the obje...

Hmm... your rotation/reflection check seems not like dealing with very many objects or something. Or maybe just with Move. Note for example the rank 10-17 objects which are just obvious rotations/reflections of each other. Also note the big puffers at present ranked 288/312/318/335 and 300/305/316/3...

So, in 850k soups of Day & Night, we've apparently found one "long-lived" pattern it. Turns out it's a spaceship. [edit:] on another note the RLE's aren't being output correctly on the webpage - the bounding boxes are off. So, for example, the one for "rocket" (incidentally, where'd you pull that na...

Well, it definitely looks like quadratic growth over that stretch, but I'm not sure it would be sustained. It's very very chaotic quadratic growth at best. I mean, it's sort of explainable. Say, if you start with a replicator and some debris, there's some probability that it will create another repl...

Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I let my pattern run overnight (my internet dies overnight for some reason anyway), and it hit 2.5mil generations. As expected, it's more of a mess than ever . I'll go do something productive now, but if someone wants the RLE of that generation for some reason, let...

There is a problem with supposing that. Basically what's happening right now is that replicators are emerging sporadically (there are maybe some 12 or 13 alive right now), but they are also dying sporadically by turning into spaceships (there are maybe some 20-ish probably dead ones). While it's tru...

Hmm... the webpage didn't seem to update for a while while I was running 2x2. Not sure why. On another note, the script was taking a while on this one time on HighLife, so I stopped it, restarted the pattern and decided to see what would happen. Well, I started it a little while ago. It's now at 1.9...

I imagine the navbar should say "Home", not "TOLLCASS Home" Other than that, extracted and running okay so far.

Huh, interesting, and some of those oscillators are really very neat (the last row of 10x10 P2's especially). Also, I must say I'm rather curious what algorithms you're using, if you don't mind sharing.

On a vaguely related note, it strikes me that the algorithm I'm proposing for still lifes (point 4 over here ) can possibly be (rather unintuitively) extended to oscillators of a chosen period. It would certainly be interesting. Basically, an oscillator is just a bunch of generations in cycle. So, w...

So, I've run into pentadecathlons three times now [edit: or maybe two times and it resumed on the same pattern]. Does this mean I've checked something like 1.6mil patterns? (alternatively, I got unlucky, I guess) (Also, thinking about the stability and object counting problems...) Also, how much wor...

Yeah, I figured out that it logs all files shortly after making the post, but you didn't see the edit that took place that time ;) But, still, I don't understand why its generation count is off quite so much. Let's take your top ranking soup. It was logged at 21k generations, but verification took 4...

MadMan's last pattern has 2 too many dots in the 4th line. I think he meant to indicate the relative position, but the variable-width font messed it up, making him add two dots for clarity. It would have been more easily done with the Code tags, by the way, like so: [code] ............ .o.............