The Game of Life implementation in this post is based on a torus. Watch the gliders when they go off the edge of the screen: they return from the other side!
Actually most of CA simulations are done on torus which is referred to as periodic boundary conditions in the literature. Alternatively you can also have null (or fixed) boundaries or reflective ones. If the initial configuration has compact support (finite number of non-null states) and the CA keeps null-neighborhoods as null in the next step, you can simulate infinite grids… but not many people bother to do it. Many many papers use finite grids on torus.
So what actually is it? None of the rules in the videos look particularly striking compared to other Life-like cellular automata and 2d cellular automata in general. As you say, their behaviour includes oscillators, spaceships, patterns that grow endlessly... all things that are well-known from other cellular automata. So the videos didn't really show off why they're interesting.
I don't mind the rambling about "planets, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters… and beyond …." but some technical detail would be nice too!
These rules use very different principles than traditional cell-based rules - for example neighbor degree, number of connections, and eligibility criteria based on connectivity.
So in short, the cells are not becoming alive or dead based on the states of their neighbors, but rather on the topology of their neighborhoods.
The details are beyond the scope of a short write up, but are easy to explore in the rule-editor in the GUI of the code.
The level of structure and self-organization is striking, to me at least.
Also in all the rules - the links are visible and can have binary or real-valued states as well as the cells. So this enables pretty rich topology which rules can utilize.
Could you try explaining it in a comment? Not the general principle, but just the rules for one particular automaton. Whichever one is your favourite. Or Amazing Dragons, if you don't have a favourite.
The amazing part of cellular automata is the emergence of complicated behaviour from simple rules. Life's rules can be written in three sentences, maybe less.
Forgive my quibbling, but I don't understand what this is doing that other projects in this space haven't done before. Adding states and transition rules to edges is new to me...
I did try running your project, but I had to tweak it to get it to work with the instructions in the repo. I seem to be missing a few packages -- mpmath, sympy, typing_extensions. Can you add those to the requirements.txt file?
Let's see if I understood this right. For the Betweenness Amazing Dragons rule:
* Compute the "betweenness" of each living cell, which is 1 divided by its degree. Cells which are not connected to anything have infinite/undefined betweenness, but it doesn't matter.
* Then, for each cell, sum up the betweenness of its connected neighbours.
* If the total betweenness of a dead cell is in the range [(1.3, 3.6)], it is born and becomes alive at the next generation.
* If the total betweenness of a living cell is in the range [(0.9, 2.6)], it survives and remains alive to the next generation.
* Exception: any cell with 0, 1, 7 or 8 neighbours (in total, ignoring betweenness) dies anyway after the rules above were applied.
... That's not quite right, there's some references to "eligibility" that I can't make sense of. What else am I missing?
It'd be better to have fewer videos on the page and select for more striking examples like this one, and put them early. I got fatgue from see so many examples.
Also, consider getting off the grid and maybe doing some topology-based automata in combination with a more traditional network presentation paradigm like a force-directed layout. That would give you a much more 'biological' look which would draw a lot of people's attention.
If they can, certainly. Assuming the developer still exists, and they still have the source code, some idea of the build environment, and they want their game to still be accessible. And even then:
> Isn't this just a matter of opening up the project, changing one line and recompiling? Should take five minutes, it's not really a big deal? Yes and no. The 64-bit change itself is small but they change enough other things every few months that recompiling against new versions of the libraries doesn't simply work. You get a few linker errors and have to look up the new names for a couple of functions. Or there's a new element in one of the libraries with the same name as one of my variables so I have to find+replace to change its name. And then you run it and find that it's in portrait mode, squished into half of the screen, so you have to look up what changes they've made to how screen orientation works and change a few more lines. [...] It adds up.
Sure, you can work around it, but from the developer's perspective their game has just been designated obsolete for no reason that Apple couldn't have fixed themselves.
The curve editor works very nicely. Did you write it yourself? I'm working on something similar, and it's really interesting to see all the things you did differently.
It's worth noting that the punishment here was pretty over the top even by US standards. In suburban middle America a college girl with no priors who bruises a cop will not ordinarily get charged with a felony. Some cities would even take the charge that she was manhandled by cops seriously and investigate it.
That seems like you're disputing the charge/verdict, not the punishment.
What is the normal punishment for felony assault of a police officer for someone with no priors?
The reason this distinction is important is because disputing the charge/verdict requires getting involved in the case and seeing the prosecution's evidence.
> The reason this distinction is important is because disputing the charge/verdict requires getting involved in the case and seeing the prosecution's evidence.
I don't agree at all but I also think we've seen enough of the evidence that there's not really much factually to dispute. (We know a lot more than the jury did, which is a very common and very depressing situation but also a separate topic)
Anyhow, felony charges are usually reserved for people who do a lot of damage, on purpose, and who have prior convictions. I agree that there's a distinction to be made between the seriousness of charges and the severity of those charges associated punishment - they're determined by different parts of government, if nothing else - but I don't think as much hangs on it as you seem to, vis a vis the way different places treat crimes more or less severely. Heavy handedness in one area correlates with heavy-handedness in the other, after all.
