 |
|
You are not logged in! F.A.Q Log in Register |
 |
|
 |
 (nobody)...and 107 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
 |
Members 8025Messages 2613410 Today 2 Topics 127499 |
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
~ some dumb smarty made a digital clock out of Conway's Game of Life and you can run it yourself if you actually follow the instructions me being me, i don't just click "run." i give it the once-over first. it is at once alien and familiar -- if you've taken courses in computer engineering (who hasn't?), then it's easy to recognize the various sections. from top to bottom: timing, logic, output. the middle/logic section is obvious, because it looks like punch cards with some data punched in. if you know electrical engineering (who doesn't?), then it's easy to recognize this section as equivalent to a driving a real-life LED clock. then, though, i am lost: the bottom/output stage is obviously a bunch of little line-generators, alright, that's clear enough... then, yes some unfathomable contraptions to turn the lines on and off. how do those work? i am fascinated. what's left? timers... the timers up atop spout out blobs that poke the middle/logic layer, and the middle/logic layer sends out blobs to switch line segments on or off. sorted. i press "run," and watch raptly to see if my hunches are confirmed. they are. i watch the pulse apporach the middle/logic, and see it react; send out changes to the display... but i have no idea how those line-generators work. how the timers... time. it's beautiful to me that i can understand exactly how this thing works, yet still be so utterly clueless. it actually made me cry, in the same way snowfall will make me cry. it's snowing outside now, actually. in any case, i am nervous. i could get addicted to this. i am immediately full of ideas that would take me weeks or months to pull off. this could utterly ruin my life. thanks, conway. thanks, metafilter. thanks, internet |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
fucking hell thats amazing |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
post II ~ context i know a bit about the history of the game. the race to create the first "glider gun," in particular. one of my favorite books is "hackers" by steven levy. in my early teens, i read that book over and over and over. it was a surrogate activity in and of itself. i've gone ahead and extracted the amazing chapter from the book about conway's game of life: |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
never mind. my computer tries to shit itself when i try to paste the whole chapter. here's the whole book: chapter seven starts on page 110. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i'll excereptppet abbbitbyte Gosper wondered what might happen if two shuttles bounced off each other, and figured that there were between two and three hundred possibilities. He tried out each one, and eventually came across a pattern that actually threw off gliders. It would move across the screen like a jitterbugging whip, spewing off limp boomerangs of phosphor. It was a gorgeous sight. No wonder this was called LIFE the program created life itself. To Gosper, Con-way's simulation was a form of genetic creation, without the vile secretions and emotional complications associated with the Real World's version of making new life. Congratulations you've given birth to a glider gun! Early the next morning Gosper made a point of printing out the coordinates of the pattern that resulted in the glider gun, and rushed down to the Western Union office to send a wire to Martin Gardner with the news. The hackers got the fifty dollars. This by no means ended the LIFE craze on the ninth floor. Each night, Gosper and his friends would monopolize the 340 display running various LIFE patterns, a continual entertainment, exploration, and journey into alternate existence. Some did not share their fascination... |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
[they] never got the idea. But to Gosper, LIFE was much more than your normal hack. He saw it as a way to "basically do science in a new universe where all the smart guys haven't already nixed you out two or three hundred years ago. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib. With LIFE you're the first guy there, and there's always fun stuff going on. You can do everything from recursive function theory to animal husbandry. There's a community of people who are sharing these experiences with you. And there's the sense of connection between you and the environment. The idea of where's the boundary of a computer. Where does the computer leave off and the environment begin?" Obviously, Gosper was hacking LIFE with near-religious intensity. The metaphors implicit in the simulation of populations, generations, birth, death, survival were becoming real to him. He began to wonder what the consequences would be if a giant supercomputer were dedicated to LIFE ... and imagined that eventually some improbable objects might be created from the pattern. The most persistent among them would survive against odds which Gosper, as a mathematician, knew were almost impossible. It would not be randomness which determined survival, but some sort of computer Darwinism. In this game which is a struggle against decay and oblivion, the survivors would be the "maximally persistent states of matter." Gosper thought that these LIFE forms would have contrived to exist they would actually have evolved into intelligent entities. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
...bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers... |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
maximally persistent state of matter, wonder what that means |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
back in one of my weasel threads, i called that "greater informational coherency." any number of bits of word salad can be used to reference the concept, but defining it is a bit more in the wind |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
reminds me of those buzzwords like synergy the use at management presentations, that sound impressive but signify nothing i can imagine data saying "i need greater informational coherency" though |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
you'd cut it in business but not you ain't got a single larry "defining it is a bit in the wind" -- it's a distant future state we don't understand -- that we will not understand -- until we get there. all we can do for now is plot a course and squint off in the distance. not much that separates defining it and achieving it, really. i'll go ahead and : take the weasels... take them, please! no, seriously now, folks, the metaphor is a tool for reverse-engineering habits and understanding them more thoroughly. take a question like, "what happens to my brain software when i'm stoned?" and it gets very confusing. software can't get stoned. trying to work through that is very abstract and goes nowhere. when you swap it out for "what happens to my brain weasels when i'm stoned," and the obvious answer is "all my weasels are stoned as well." then the answers to lots of sub-questions are either obvious or bring up important sub-points. that doesn't mean i'm using done software as a metaphor. the weasel thing is just a different angle of attack. you circle around some blob of question marks and eventually you've broken it up from one mass into two or three, those get their own metaphors, and on you go. ditto for gosper's metaphor vs. my metaphor. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i'll go ahead and quote myself: |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Messageboard index
|
|||||||||
