22 votes

A digital clock in Conway's Game of Life

3 comments

  1. [2]
    Cirrus
    (edited )
    Link
    Conway's game of life is turing complete, and someone made a digital clock in it. If you don't know what the game of life is, Numberphile did a video about it with John Conway. You could also read...

    Conway's game of life is turing complete, and someone made a digital clock in it. If you don't know what the game of life is, Numberphile did a video about it with John Conway. You could also read the wikipedia article about it, but I found it a little confusing without a video. I will copy wikipedia's summary of it:

    The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite, two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead, (or populated and unpopulated, respectively). Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

    Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by under population.
    Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
    Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
    Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

    The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed; births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. Each generation is a pure function of the preceding one. The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

    5 votes
    1. Diff
      Link Parent
      Someone left and deleted a comment earlier but it sent me down a rabbit hole that eventually led to Tetris in GoL. These crazy scrubs basically implemented a Wireworld lookalike in massive...

      Someone left and deleted a comment earlier but it sent me down a rabbit hole that eventually led to Tetris in GoL. These crazy scrubs basically implemented a Wireworld lookalike in massive 2048x2048 "metapixels" that have different game of life rules per metapixel. Then they used those customized metapixels to build wires and logic gates and eventually an asynchronous RISC computer. They designed an instruction set and wrote their own low and high level languages all to eventually make Tetris.

      4 votes
  2. joelthelion
    Link
    Does it handle daylight saving time and leap seconds? :-p Just joking, these things are amazing!

    Does it handle daylight saving time and leap seconds? :-p

    Just joking, these things are amazing!

    2 votes