Talk:Conway's Game of Life/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Conway's criteria

I've tagged the list of Conway's criteria as needing a better source. A "private communication" to a mailing list might not be impossible to verify, but it's pretty hard; searching for what apparently was the text of that message (see also the edit history) on the public web finds nothing. XOR'easter (talk) 18:28, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

The mailing list in question was private and is defunct (became hosted on Yahoo! Groups which stopped working in 2020). I don't know if full archives are saved anywhere. I have copies of messages for some ranges of dates but they don't cover that date. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:46, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Dang. Thanks for looking, though! XOR'easter (talk) 18:48, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

In 2019, Dvgrn sent me an archive of the mailing list (known as "LifeCA") spanning 1992 to 2009, and, if it means anything, I can confirm that the message in question is indeed real. It's actually an excerpt from a relatively long email by Conway which itself was a reply to an even longer one by Nick Gotts regarding the universality proof outlined in Winning Ways. However, he does not give any sort of list of criteria in this email. Ionmars10 (talk) 01:38, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the confirmation! I believe the list of criteria was originally taken from Gardner's article, and then modified. Gardner doesn't talk about a universal Turing machine or a von Neumann universal constructor. To be honest, I don't really follow the rationale for the change. Gardner doesn't say that Conway thought populations would stay bounded; he says that Conway wanted initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit without this being easy to prove. To me, this is consistent with saying the whole point of "life" was to find a universal CA. I've tried to wrangle that part of the "Origins" section to attribute these things more clearly. XOR'easter (talk) 03:13, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Game Of Life And Death

Game Of Life And Death [sic] redirects here but isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. According to the article very briefly at that location, it was or is a variant of the Game of Life. Is it likely that a mention in the "variations" section could be useful, or should the redirect be deleted? – Arms & Hearts (talk) 19:43, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there's any content worth saving or mentioning. It's just someone's non-notable app. As far as I can tell the redirect should be deleted. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:13, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

"Game Of Life And Death" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Game Of Life And Death and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 23#Game Of Life And Death until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:39, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

"Conway's game of life in reverse" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Conway's game of life in reverse and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 24#Conway's game of life in reverse until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 16:47, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Chrome bug?

I attempted to view this page on Chrome (104.0.5112.102) and it choked badly. It works on Edge. 132.170.208.216 (talk) 14:24, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@132.170.208.216: Works fine in Chrome for me. What problem do you see?--Nø (talk) 15:45, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Life with relativistic rules

Has anyone ever created a Life game that incorporates the physics of special relativity? This would involve having a Life grid where all cells do not change state at the same time (as in a Newtonian universe), but rather each cell experiences a delay from some arbitrary center point (some chose frame of reference cell). Each time the cell in the center of the frame of reference changes state, its new value propagates throughout the rest of the grid at some set speed (akin to photons propagating at the speed of light). Thus events at cells far away from the center frame of reference experience non-simultaneity, modeling the physics of an Einsteinian universe. Just curious. — Loadmaster (talk) 19:35, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Smallest undecidable seed?

What I was looking for when I visited the article was a link or lead towards the smallest known undecidable seed for the game. Or is it impossible to know for sure if any particular seed is actually undecidable? In that case, I guess I'd try to reword the question in terms of "How big is the smallest seed which is suspected of being undecidable?" Shanen (talk) 02:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think your question makes sense if by size you mean the area of its bounding box. For any size you name, there are only a finite number of patterns, all of which have some fixed fate that can be stated by an algorithm, for instance one that hardcodes a list of these patterns and their fates. So nothing can be undecidable. On the other hand, if you mean the number of live cells, it's at most 65: every glider-constructible pattern can be constructed using at most 15 carefully-placed gliders, and that includes families of patterns (not individual patterns!) with undecidable fates. See e.g. the note in https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Patterns_constructible_by_a_given_number_of_gliders . But that's not a reliable source by Wikipedia standards, so we would need something better than that before we can state anything about this in our article. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)