Every time I watch this video, I get a sense of existential crisis. Another cool video that relaxes me is this one [0]. It feeds another type of Turing complete cellular automaton called Rule 110 [1] into Game of Life.
That’s really creative to combine the two CAs like that, I’ve never seen that done before. It suggests a whole algebra of the objects that result from composing two systems.
Mind blowing as this is, I feel the video would be much improved if it gave some visibility to the birth/death transition in the second order cells while still zoomed in enough to see a bit more of the workings of the first order elements.
Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers."
Has this submission ever reached the HN homepage? I personally tried to submit it twice but no upvotes at all, which I believe it deserves. I just checked the history again [0], none of the post ever made it, which is unfortunate. I thought Hacker News readers would be interested in a RISC processor built in the Game of Life.
I won't say it's political, and it isn't about karma. There are political submissions (I sometimes submit/upvote political articles deliberately to "test the water", i.e. not because I agree, I simply want to see what are the opinions here), and there are cases when people care about karma.
But often, there are simply many technically interesting articles you'd want to share, and I have a small history of success of submitting technically interesting articles to the homepage with no politics involved, such as tips and tricks of microcontrollers or the use of 50-ohm transmission line in RF engineering. My conclusion is that an attractive title [0] and some luck is needed. However, I tried to include the keyword "Building a RISC processor in Game of Life", but it still fails to get any votes.
My conclusion is, unfortunately, the majority of HN reader doesn't know what the Game of Life is and/or doesn't think building things in GoF is attractive.
[0] HN has a fairly strict "original title" rule to discourage clickbait, I mostly agree, but sometimes a title genuinely doesn't completely explain and provide enough context about what is in the article, which is otherwise interesting. No votes and no readers would be the result, which isn't really fair.
What blows my mind about this is not the universal computation simulating itself, but that it looks a lot like ribosomes decoding RNA and making protein. And then flashing that it doesn't just look like them.
Based on following the links in the video details, it looks like it's built around something called the OCTA metapixel [0][1][2].
Conceptually, I could see how once you have an "abstract programmable pixel" with mechanisms to change how they interact with each other, it becomes "straightforward", since you can abstract away the concept of a pixel and its interaction with neighbors.
You can think about it step-by-step: first you need some rectangular structure that has two well-defined states to represent your cells, then you think of how to implement periodic refresh and communication between neighboring cells, some gadgets for and/or gates, etc. As you have gliders, glider guns, and similar building blocks, it is not that difficult, given enough patience. Very nice to look at though :)
You might find some of the details of its construction interesting: https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details. While it doesn't explain the inspiration behind it, it does show that there's a definite structure to it.
