First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life

Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"

Comments

Nanites

[Pojut]

They're coming to take over. Sure, of course there are only a few hundred at first...but then those become thousands, then millions, then billions. Soon, we will all be knee deep in this shit.

lolwut?

Re:Nanites

[archmcd]

OMG!! What have we done!? Let's hope these creatures don't become intelligent, and devise a way to harvest energy from "human batteries."

Re:Nanites

[jgagnon]

And to take care of them we'll create nannites. :p

(or nanny-ites)

Re:Nanites

[bunratty]

IBM has already developed a high-fidelity 3-D copier. They scrapped the project when they realized they would likely sell only two units.

Re:Nanites

[smellsofbikes]

That's a superb joke, but if you're bored and want to read some extensions of the idea you should find a copy of Venus Equilateral by George Smith some time. In one of the stories, engineers make (by mistake, basically) a device that can replicate other devices, and then realize it can replicate itself, so they build a few mostly for fun. Since they're on an isolated space station they transmit information about what they've done back to earth and then find out that earth's economy is collapsing because everyone's either duplicating money or duplicating duplication machines and there's no reason to buy anything. Smith explores how that affects the economy for a while (one character's snooty wife has to stop being a socialite and get a job as a nurse, because Smith was basically a 1930's misogynist) and then has his engineers cook up a physical item that contains energy, which the matter duplicator can't duplicate (since it only deals with matter) to act as a new basis for currency. He wrote all this in the 1940's, so, y'know, prior art and all that.

Re:Nanites

[bunratty]

Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?

Re:Nanites

[UnknownSoldier]

Part of that reality is coming true...

http://hubpages.com/hub/This-affordable-3D-printer-can-print-itself

Re:Nanites

[selven]

A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.

Re:Nanites

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that, in this case, "economy collapsing" seems to be a synonym for "post-scarcity economy breaking out", I'd have to go with "good".

Even if Home Taping Is Killing Music(tm), there would be about a billion people being too busy having enough to eat for the first time in their lives to give a fuck. (Plus, of course, the "think of the poor artists" argument kind of breaks down when the artists are all sprawled out around their post-scarcity-cocaine-replicator, having a grand old time...)

Unless you are deeply skeptical of the (empirically undeniable) human tendency to do creative stuff for fuck-all material reward, or cling to the (arguably ethically repulsive) notions that toil and suffering are goods in themselves, it is pretty hard to argue with a post-scarcity-society.

Re:Nanites

[aliquis]

IBM has already developed a high-fidelity 3-D copier. They scrapped the project when they realized they would likely sell only two units.

Maybe it was for the better. Considering Microsoft would pop up and offer to help them improve the software for it later.

Re:Nanites

[jackbird]

I dunno, while The Diamond Age and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom were interesting places to visit, I (and most of the characters) wouldn't want to live there. Of course both of those societies had haves and have-nots based on resources that continued to be scarce (raw matter/energy in one and human regard in the other).

Re:Nanites

[bunratty]

Let's just think through the repercussions of replicator technology a bit. Just because material goods are free does not mean services will be free. To get medical treatment, you would need money. To get money, you would need to do something that would enable you to get money, such as provide some kind of service to others. I don't think that just because our basic material needs would be met that we would have 16 hours a day to do what we want. Our jobs would simply change from producing goods to providing services (which is something that is already happening anyway).

Re:Nanites

[smellsofbikes]

To be fair, The Diamond Age was not truly a post-scarcity society because people had to pay for the energy used for duplication (hence the scene where after the kids had created all this stuff they had to stick it all back in the compiler and destroy it again because their mom couldn't pay the bill for what they'd made.) So, what they had was an everything-available-for-a-reasonable-price society, a la iTunes. Unfortunately for our future, I think that's the most likely result if/when we DO manage to make matter compilers, since they'd necessarily take energy to run as a function of thermodynamics.

I *would* like to live in that world, because the only things worth more than their energy content would be innovations, that could briefly be hawked for above their energy content value, and when everyone has equal access to the best toolset, that makes for a very low barrier of entry for bringing innovations to the world. I think we'd see an amazing flowering of non-obvious but very useful inventions.

Re:Nanites

[geekoid]

Poverty will be eradicated

no, it will change because the definition of wealth will change.
Original work, labor, land. These will be the measure of wealth.

"Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and "

No, it will change to be used for people to by and sell shares of things that can't be duplicated.
Original art*, manual labor and so on. When you want landscape done, what do you use to motivate people to do the work for you? A sky scraper? Barter? Land?

"will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want."
Why do you assume they won't be beholden to a landlord?

*yes the art can be duplicataty, but not the originality.

Re:Nanites

[geekoid]

"To get medical treatment, you would need money. "

No, you need something the doctor values. there is a big difference there. A doctor can replicate in car, boat, tv,, gold clubs whatever. Just like everyone else. So money, even the idea of money, looses its value.

OTOH, he may want services., or just do it because they like to help people.

Logically, this technology would mean that all physical items the doctor needs to treat people would be free. so his cost go down a lot.

Many service wouldn't be needed. food service for one. Something breaks, you won't need to get it serviced because you would just get a new one.

Re:Nanites

[bunratty]

Something breaks, you won't need to get it serviced because you would just get a new one.

I wonder what the repercussions of that would be. Where would we put all the broken possessions? In any case, you would need someone to haul away the old thing and possibly install the new thing. Services, man, services.

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard of George Smith before, so I guess I'll take your word for it that he was a misogynist. After all, that sort of thing was a lot more common back then. However, I really don't see how a snooty female socialite character in a book automatically marks an author as a misogynist. So I can only assume that the existence of that character is not your only evidence that he was a misogynist. Just asking, because people do tend to get a little oversensitive at times, and often see hatred/conspiracy/etc when there is none. Sometimes a snooty female character in a book really is just a character in a book, and nothing more.

Re:Nanites

[dave420]

I'm sure if we had the technology to rearrange molecules the way we want, we'd be able to destroy what we wanted, or simply recycle the molecules into a working form or something else entirely.

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

let's not forget the game of life is just a piece of software, and let's not get over excited!

Re:Nanites

[operagost]

then has his engineers cook up a physical item that contains energy

Like a battery? Pretty simple solution.

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

Payment is not the only incentive to create. In fact, for many it is the weakest incentive

Re:Nanites

[bunratty]

True, getting rid of waste would be the least of our problems. When anyone could replicate any amount of drugs, poisons, bombs, or nuclear weapons that they could get their hands on, we'd have more pressing issues than environmental concerns.

In any case, it never ceases to amaze me how on Slashdot so many readers can see only the benefits of a new policy or technology. Some put the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag on articles about any new technology, but it's troubling to think that so many think that getting rid of patents and copyrights could cause only desirable effects. Are they really that naive, or are they just not taking the time to thinking through all the repercussions?

Re:Nanites

[trout007]

I'm a libertarian but I tell my friends that when such a machine is invented we will have communism. The good kind not the kind that marches millions off to their deaths. Because at this point there is no reason to have capital. Capital is someone saving their wealth to build something that makes them more productive. But this machine would be able to create anything including itself which means this is the last piece of capital equipment. Now people would still design things for fun like better replicators but it will only be for fun since all of your needs will be met anyway.

Re:Nanites

[smellsofbikes]

The point of *good* science fiction is to explore the repurcussions. (Trash science fiction just explores the fantasies of what could happen if everything went right.) Stanislaw Lem used to say that if all knowledge of literature was erased, the first thing people would start writing would be science fiction, of the prediction-of-catastrophe-if-we-keep-this-up sort.

In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.

Re:Nanites

[selven]

Poverty will be eradicated

no, it will change because the definition of wealth will change.

Poverty is not about being wealthy. As Wikipedia puts it, "poverty means being unable to afford basic human needs". If the basic human needs are provided for everyone, regardless of the social structure that emerges afterward there will by definition be no poverty.

Why do you assume they won't be beholden to a landlord?

Because land outside of cities is very cheap, and will get even cheaper if the demand to use it for food production disappears. Since the main point of living in cities is not having to drive 3 hours to work, and work will no longer be a part of many people's lives. For those who still want to work, the only kind of work left will largely be the kind you can do with a laptop transferring the fruits of your labor over the internet.

Also, why shouldn't the concept of land ownership disappear entirely? Right now, its only legitimate purposes are privacy and managing agriculture and resource gathering rights. The second purpose will disappear, and the first one can be satisfied with dedicated laws that won't allow someone to gather up a whole bunch of land and rent it out at high prices.

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

So say I want something from this guy who can't do anything for me, but can do something for this other guy who CAN do some thing for me?

Say there's an even longer chain. Do we need to get everyone in that chain involved for the transaction to take place?

What say we just assign some arbitrary value to the service I'm provided with, mark it down somewhere and then we can say I'm owed "X value in services" which I can then take straight to the guy who provides services I want, and make a separate transaction with him.

Totally not money though, because I'm not buying items... ... ...

sarcasm

Re:Nanites

[vrmlguy]

A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.

Unfortunately, history disagrees. The Samoan islands were a utopia; food was freely available by wading out into the bay and shelter was almost unnecessary due to the clement weather. So, everyone's favorite pastime was fucking and drowning the excess babies. Compare this to the Mediterranean, where earlier ecological collapse had ruined the farmlands and you needed walls to keep out hostile neighbors. The upper class'es favorite pastime? Natural philosophy.

Re:Nanites

[Ihmhi]

To get medical treatment, you would need money.

Yes, because all those doctors working in charity and public hospitals are in it for a fraction of the salary they could make in private practice.

You know, some doctors actually do do it for the good of the people or the joy of healing others. There's not a whole lot of money going out into the middle of nowhere and helping the sick and poor, but loads of doctors do it many times in their lifetime (if not regularly or even permanently).

Re:Nanites

[MadMorf]

Just because material goods are free does not mean services will be free. To get medical treatment, you would need money.

Replicate yourself a doctor and have him treat you...

Or, replicate yourself as an earlier, non-sick, you...Just like they did with the Doctor in STTNG...

Re:Nanites

[thasmudyan]

To get medical treatment, you would need money.

Or, you know, doctors would only be people who aren't in it for the money, because those are the doctors you really want anyway. The same would apply for all other professions. Everybody would be free to do what they like, even if that happens to be nothing at all. I think we'd see some pretty amazing advances in science and art without the ever-looming yoke of scarcity.

People seem to be so enamored with the status quo, with our entire society based on the concept of scarcity and monetary value, they tend to freak out if the subject of abolishing it even comes up. I just hope when the time comes we'll make the right decision and let go of this model instead of keeping it alive artificially (as we do now with so many other bad ideas that have become obsolete but are still on life support).

Re:Nanites

[Tom]

Of course it's bullshit. People would still need to build things and provide services. The main change would be that everything needs to be built only once and can then be replicated. But the thing that you want to replicate has to come from somewhere.

It's an interesting and philosophic concept, but in most cases it is blown out of proportion. A lot of our economy is not built around building stuff. Things need to be created, invented, transported and provided. In fact, even today only a small fraction of the cost of most of the items we buy is in the actual construction.

The economy would change dramatically, because as I said you'd only be able to make a profit on the first sale. But quite honestly, I even doubt that money would disappear. Physical money, as in coins and bills, would. But we already have most of our money in electronic storage.

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd invest in garbage disposal and become rich!

Oh wait, neither investing nor being rich will be possible. Duh.

Re:Nanites

[HyperQuantum]

Many service wouldn't be needed. food service for one. Something breaks, you won't need to get it serviced because you would just get a new one.

What about disposal services? Who is going to get rid of all those discarded (broken) items? Can we simply assume that the invention of a replication device cannot happen without the introduction of a universal recycling device at the exact same time?

Re:Nanites

[LordLimecat]

Something breaks, you won't need to get it serviced because you would just get a new one.

Isnt that pretty much the way it is for all non-major purchases these days (ie, car, house, boat)? And would you really be replicating in a new car every time you need new break pads, or an oil change?

Re:Nanites

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, thats silly. I mean, I'm sure the story is great, but matter, like *everything* is just another form of energy, so if the machine can't replicate energy, it can't replicate matter.

Re:Nanites

[evilandi]

"you need something the doctor values"

No, the doctor needs to be given something he values. I don't have to have it myself. That can be provided by a third party (or, as you stated, it might be a perk of the job itself).

I live in the UK. I pay taxes to fund the NHS which pays for doctors for every British citizen, regardless of whether those citizens pay tax. When I travel abroad inside the European Union, NHS tax money funds any basic healthcare I might require in those countries, too; the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC).

Re:Nanites

[Shompol]

This being the future, there will be no physical money to duplicate. Already, my bank account is a number in a bank computer, and 99% of my transactions are magnetic card subtracting numbers from that bank number, not useful to duplicate. If course, this could not be foreseen in 1940's.
I say we are ready for the self-duplicating duplication machine, time to invent one :)

Re:Nanites

[ultranova]

Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?

Did you get paid for that analysis? No? Then what incentivized you to make it?

The simple fact is that humans enjoy accomplishing things. If I had unlimited resources, the first thing I'd do was get a few thousand computers, network them together, and start researching AI. Some other people would likely concentrate on particle physics, astronomy, or whatever. Some would paint for the joy of it, some would write, some would compose.

Endless vacation is a common dream because a common jobs suck. Allow people to do whatever they want without threat of starvation hanging over them and they'll do things out of curiosity, desire for fame, or simply because.

Re:Nanites

[ultranova]

I'm a libertarian but I tell my friends that when such a machine is invented we will have communism. The good kind not the kind that marches millions off to their deaths.

Actually, that's called post-scarcity economy. It has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an economic system where the means of production are owned by the state, capitalism is a situation where they are privately owned by some people, and post-scarcity is a situation where they are as plentiful as the air so there's no point in worrying about ownership - just take some whenever you need them.

Both communism and capitalism - and economic systems in general - are systems for managing scarce resources. Post-scarcity is a situation where resources are for all practical purposes limitless, so managing them is pointless.

As it happens post-scarcity is the only situation where libertarianism is workable, because it's the only one where the spectre of starvation doesn't help the haves to coerce the have-nots, making cooperation actually voluntary. So, as a libertarian, you really should look forward to such a machine :).

Re:Nanites

[godefroi]

How about not shooting him in the head? That might be something he wants...

I'm all for the great "we'll all be free to pursue our passions instead of being a slave to wages" dreams, but the fact is that most of the degenerate scum on the earth here have no higher passions to pursue, and would simply resort to violence for fun.

Re:Nanites

[godefroi]

Wesley Mouch? Is that you?

Re:Nanites

[ncc74656]

I'm all for the great "we'll all be free to pursue our passions instead of being a slave to wages" dreams, but the fact is that most of the degenerate scum on the earth here have no higher passions to pursue, and would simply resort to violence for fun.

Perhaps the thought that their would-be victims could replicate a Ma Deuce, a BFG9000, or whatever to deal with that problem would keep that tendency in check.

Re:Nanites

[godefroi]

Or maybe they'd listen to Reason?

Re:Nanites

[BranMan]

Nonsense! If you had to pay for the energy of duplication then the first things you'd duplicate are solar panels, set them up, then have all the free power you'd ever need to duplicate more stuff (even if only during the day). For any scarcity, you use the duplicator to eliminate it. That's what it's FOR!

Re:Nanites

[jesset77]

When anyone could replicate any amount of drugs, poisons, bombs, or nuclear weapons that they could get their hands on, we'd have more pressing issues than environmental concerns.

Opium and Marijuana can already be "replicated" with marginal effort and a sun lamp. Self replicating machines indeed? Natures ahead of you by several billion years there.

Please see recent issues of the Anarchist's Cookbook if you're interested to know how to make amphetamines, poisons or explosives in the privacy of your own garage. Nukes are complicated enough (heavy, exotic radioisotopes, anyone?) to be at the head of any list of products your replicator would have a hard time with. Following that on the list would be loyal standing armies and fleets of airships.

it's troubling to think that so many think that freedom can cause only desirable effects.

Sorry, fixed that for you to make it a little bit more general. But yeah, I feel your pain, brother. When you allow people to accomplish things they never could before, be it eating for free or listening to whatever music they want, they never stop to think of the agri-business or the Jonas Brothers whom they are selfishly evicting from their wallets. 8I

Re:Nanites

[jesset77]

In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.

Yes, so the Replicators and Matter Reclamation Units in the Star Trek universe function the same way. The matter you dispose of is converted into energy, and then a portion of that energy is used to power the re-assembly of another helping back into matter. You get less material mass than you put into the system, and I suppose you would get thermal entropy as well. Though Heisenberg doesn't allow you to reach 100% efficiency in such a solution, he also doesn't dictate how inefficient you are forced to be.

Anyhow, no matter how good science fiction is there will always be some repercussions left unexplored and some loose ends swept under the rug. Realism is by definition not one of the most important elements in fiction. Believability is important, and setting the stage to explore the issues you really expect to explore. For issues that are not relevant to your metaphor, you find the least distracting method to gloss over them.

Re:Nanites

[jesset77]

And would you really be replicating in a new car every time you need new break pads, or an oil change?

I'unno. I am thinking "reclaim + replicate = fix". Let the reclamator dissolve your moderately damaged or worn vehicle completely, then reassemble it good as new, and viola, it's even next year's model! ;3

Re:Nanites

[jesset77]

Also, why shouldn't the concept of land ownership disappear entirely?

Read Phillip Hose Farmer, "To your scattered bodies go". He posits a planet called "Riverworld" where about 36 billion humans live with room to spare (70%+ of the surface area of the Earth-sized planet is habitable paradise), where everyone's food and basic needs are provided for free as if by magic, everyone is immortal and the dead are resurrected every morning; but everything still devolves into war over control of land and slaves.

I'm not trying to say our kind cannot achieve a utopic lifestyle, nor that replicator technology would harm us more than it would hurt us, I'm just trying to say we would still have a ton of problems to work out and lots of political struggles left to wrestle. :3

Re:Nanites

[Archades54]

Land is always finite, that would be the last bastion of value if the replicator didn't require power or other resources.

Re:Nanites

[Jedi Alec]

People seem to be so enamored with the status quo, with our entire society based on the concept of scarcity and monetary value, they tend to freak out if the subject of abolishing it even comes up. I just hope when the time comes we'll make the right decision and let go of this model instead of keeping it alive artificially (as we do now with so many other bad ideas that have become obsolete but are still on life support)

That is because some people, including here on /., are incapable of dealing with the concept that one might take actions that are not directly in one's own interest. Greed is the greatest good, and money is their god.

Re:Nanites

[Jedi Alec]

And a lot of us upstanding citizens will happily join the police force once monetary compensation is no longer an issue. For every piece of degenerate scum there's someone to stop him. Besides, with all the toys they could dream of at their disposal...just how much fun is violence anyway?

Re:Nanites

[godefroi]

I dunno. You seem to have more faith in humanity than I do. I *WANT* to believe, but man, it just seems like the intelligent people are vastly outnumbered...

First!

[nomorecwrd]

Self Replicating post! :-P

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Self Replicating post! :-P

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Elf Replicating Host ;-D

Re:First!

[blackraven14250]

Damned mutants!

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

I FUCKED YOUR GRANDMA

Re:First!

[nomorecwrd]

OMG!!... What have I done... it is already mutating and evolving.

Elf Replicating Ghost ;-D

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

No worries, this one can't replicate itself. It's the Monsanto strain.

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Life finda a way.

Re:First!

[seven of five]

Shelf supplicating ghost

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chef defficating goat

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quelf suffocating roast.

Re:First!

[aliquis]

Only mean we will pick it up by accident and then have to pay AC for it even though we never wanted it.

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chief Deffibrilating Goatse

Re:First!

[JrGrouch0]

Oooh... A lesson in not changing history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa!

I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought someone had come up with a glider gun which created & shot out other glider guns... this was about 20 years ago from my memory...

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[emurphy42]

TFA mentions glider guns - they're indeed an old discovery, but they just create and shoot out gliders. This thing actually creates copies of itself.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Pojut]

Sort of like a vending machine that sells other vending machines?

With apologies to Mitch Hedberg (RIP)

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[betterunixthanunix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evoloop

Not exactly Conway's game of life, but similar concept, and it is certainly possible to encode this in Conway's game of life.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Crippere]

No, this structure, Gemini, creates -a- copy of itself, self-destructing in the process.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[jfengel]

And doesn't a glider do that?

Reading in between the lines of the article, it sounds like this thing manages to create the copy before the destruction of the original is complete, unlike a glider which is basically moving itself. But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.

Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[shutdown -p now]

If I understand correctly, it creates two copies while self-destructing in the process. So it is, indeed, replicating.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[dissy]

Sort of like a vending machine that sells other vending machines?

No, it's more like the ATM Machine. The machine that makes ATMs!

You just go to the ATM Machine, put in your ATMM card, and withdraw a shiny new ATM.

As a bonus, from this ATM you can then withdraw money to use in your above vending machine machine, and various vending machines.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[seven of five]

Does it run on AC current?

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[durrr]

If a glider is mutated, it most likely is not viable and dies. Perhaps the gemini have a tolerance for mutations, being a evolution-compatible replicator.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Sir_Lewk]

Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.

Agreed. Kind of like all of the commonly accepted scientific definition of "life". Requirements that lifeforms be made of cells or have a metabolism seem incredibly silly in face of the possibilities computation has presented us. The entire topic is wishy-washy and not terribly objective. People just make up the requirements as they go to allow them to classify things as they had been before.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if enough AC's post crap comments without getting modded to -1

Oh crap...

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Bigjeff5]

But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.

It seems arbitrary, but given that they haven't been able to do it in the last 20 years, it's obviously not an arbitrary distinction.

Check out the forum where it was posted: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0

That's the game of life forum - Conway is the guy who invented it.

Reading the replies suggests this is a very, very big deal. Lots of comments like "A new age in Game of Life exploration and design!" or "undoubtedly the single most impressive construction so far in Life" seem to indicate that this is a very significant achievement.

One big distinction, is a glider doesn't take 34 million generations to replicate. In fact, the pattern itself is what moves it, so it's not really generating new gliders at all. More like a "take a pixel from here and put it here" operation, caterpillar style movement.

From the article, there are other designs that should work, but they require 10^18 generations to complete the replication, which isn't workable.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[hitmark]

reprap?

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[ukyoCE]

You would need a glider gun that shoots out more glider guns.

Which would be hella fun, actually.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[natehoy]

No, but it's mobile and runs completely on electricity, so it's an EV vehicle. It's got a CVT transmission and qualifies as a PZEV vehicle as well. I haven't seen the diagrams, but I assume it would run on DC current.

When it runs out of power, your SOL of luck, though. But only an astute /.dot reader would know about that if they RTFAed the article.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[nacturation]

Check out the forum where it was posted: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0

That's the game of life forum - Conway is the guy who invented it.

It may be a popular forum, but the domain conwaylife.com is not owned by Conway.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Pantero Blanco]

You would need a glider gun that shoots out more glider guns.

Which would be hella fun, actually.

There is a breeder pattern that uses a set of ships to produce a stream of glider guns, but (being regular Gosper Glider Guns) they don't move once they've been created.

The applet on Paul Callahan's page has it stored as one of the example patterns.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[blair1q]

Now that's interesting.

When i first read the headline I was befuddled. The whole point of the game is that its structures replicate themselves and create other things all over the map.

But I don't recall ever seeing one that made multiple copies of itself, and then died.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Bozdune]

That's what happened when I had my two kids.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[SpaceLifeForm]

Grandparent did not say Conway invented the domain name.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[ukyoCE]

That's an awesome pattern for sure. But to be a self-replicating pattern, the glider-gun breeder would need to breed glider-gun breeders. (did I get that right?)

I still can't tell from the comments if the pattern in the article is *actually* self-replicating, or if it just destroys itself while creating a single copy. If that's all it does, this doesn't sound any more remarkable than your basic glider, which also "replicates and destroys itself" as it moves across the screen.

What is actually more interesting from reading TFA, is that he's feeding a tape of "instructions" into a turing machine. At least thats how the article makes it sound like this works. Other references in the article to non-destructive copies such as a photocopier sound like unwarranted sensationalism.

Wolfram is also referenced in the article as calling the "self-replicating pattern" unimpressive. He references a single-dimension automata that cycles through a pattern, effectively the same thing this much-much-more-elaborate pattern is doing.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[ukyoCE]

The article is a bit mystifying, but it does refer several times to the original "gemini" being destroyed while a single new one is created. It also seems to require the "tape" of glider "bits" coming into it to create the copy, which makes it even less "replicating" than a basic glider.

It's more like kicking a very big pattern across the screen than it is "self-replication". Gemini moves from one location to another far away, and it required a swift kick to get it there. In this case the kicking is probably more interesting than the moving.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[nacturation]

Grandparent did not say Conway invented the domain name.

You're being disingenuous. By saying "Conway is the guy who invented it" in the same sentence as promoting a website that has conway in the domain name, I find it difficult to conclude that there wasn't meant to be an implied association between the two. This is especially true given that everyone already knows it's "Conway's Game of Life" (that's in the article title) and given that when you parse the sentence, "it" refers to the forum.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, you're right. TFA is rather confusing on the precise nature of the thing, but the Gemini article on LifeWiki explains what it actually is:

... Alternatively, 'knightship' may refer to any spaceship that travels in an oblique direction (not diagonally or orthogonally). The first oblique spaceship to be discovered, Gemini, was found in May, 2010 with a velocity of (5120,1024)c/33699586. In June, 2010 Dave Greene constructed the first true knightship in Life, which is based on Gemini and travels at a velocity of (4096,8192)/c35567490.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Pantero Blanco]

I wasn't offering the breeder pattern as an example of self-replication, just as an example of a "glider gun gun". As for Wade's pattern... Well, I've been running the simulation for over an hour and it's barely past generation 10M (and the actual replication isn't supposed to be complete until almost 40M). Perhaps the construction outpaces the destruction in such a way that we do have two full copies of the original pattern, eventually.

Wolfram did seem impressed by Wade's pattern; he just said that the interviewer was trying to apply it to the wrong field:

Rather than contributing to our understanding of life, Wolfram says Wade's discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components like the cells in Life.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[ukyoCE]

That's a remarkably accurate and non-sensational description of what Gemini does. Thanks!

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[jfengel]

They repeatedly refer to it as a "spaceship", and that's what I said it was. It moves, rather than really replicating.

But the replication wasn't the interesting part in the first place; they've long known how to do that. (In fact, they imply that they can turn it into a replicator quite easily.)

Reading between the lines, it's the first time they've achieved this movement with a particular kind of construction, one that will be more "programmable" than your basic glider gun. Which is interesting, within the game, though it sounds as if various bloggers are intent on making it more than that.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Thud457]

"Yo dawg, I heard you like redundancy in your recursive acronyms so I put I put an redundant recursive multi-letter acronym in your RMLA acronym"
-- there, done.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[mog007]

Has anybody tried to implement a Game of Life with a degree of mutation in it? It would be interesting to see some of the simpler "lifeforms" from the game evolve over time.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[operagost]

did you died?

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Sir_Lewk]

There are plenty of examples of "IRL" self replicating organisms that do in fact die after they are done replicating, so I'm not sure what you think your point is.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[pclminion]

And doesn't a glider do that?

If the motion of a glider to a new position counts as replicating itself, then me getting up and walking to another room counts as replicating myself. That's nonsense.

Replication is only replication if the original copy remains behind. A glider doesn't do that.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Cillian]

I think most of the power of the current game comes from the determinism, allowing design of complicated stuff. In order for any kind of pattern to withstand mutations I expect you'd need an awful lot more stuff overall (redundancy?), i.e. bigger universes, far more cycles...

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Teleportation in life isn't that new either. There have been "ftl" (faster than 1 cell per cycle) movement constructs for years. There has even been a Universal Turing Machine made for Life.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[dvgrn]

If I understand correctly, it creates two copies while self-destructing in the process. So it is, indeed, replicating.

Now that's interesting.

When i first read the headline I was befuddled. The whole point of the game is that its structures replicate themselves and create other things all over the map.

But I don't recall ever seeing one that made multiple copies of itself, and then died.

This is a tricky point. The people who say that this new pattern is not ultimately different from a glider are correct, in a sense -- the Gemini spaceship is technically a spaceship, not a replicator.

It _does_ make two copies -- but the copies are of the two replicator units at the ends of the glider channels, not of the entire spaceship.

But replicator units replicating themselves, even with the help of an outside stream of instructions (which is then reflected on to the next newly-created copy of a replicator unit) are still something that hasn't been seen before in the Life universe. So this is a much more impressive technical accomplishment than, say, finding a new variety of spaceship using a search utility.

Gliders and spaceships "replicate" themselves in somewhat the same way that salt crystals or wildfires do -- that's just the way the universe works, you might say. But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.

The replicator units are like robots that include all the tools needed to make more robots exactly like themselves -- but they're radio-controlled and have no internal memory, so you have to pipe the actual construction recipe in from somewhere else. That means they're not self-contained self-replicators, true -- but they're a darn sight closer than a salt crystal or a glider!

Eventually someone will build a pattern with an internal memory that can hold a complete self-construction recipe -- but the Gemini is an important milestone along the way to that goal, and the first true Life replicator will probably contain ideas taken from the Gemini, just as the Gemini contains ideas and mechanisms from preceding patterns.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Iamthecheese]

Gliders and spaceships "replicate" themselves in somewhat the same way that salt crystals or wildfires do -- that's just the way the universe works, you might say. But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.

how so? will this pattern repair itself if anything happens to it? will it protect itself from outside influences? like a cell wall protects the inside of a cell? so how is it reconstructing itself in spite of the things around it? how is this anything but a different kind of glider?

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Mindcontrolled]

Given that Conway's Game of Life is Turing-complete, it is definitely possible. Thanks for the link, gotta check this out more closely tonight.

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[dvgrn]

But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.

how so?

I was hoping someone would ask that. Let me start out with a comparison to other cellular automata. Conway's Life is B3/S23 -- "born if 3 neighbors, survives if 2 or 3 neighbors". There are other rules, such as HighLife (B36/S23, very close to Conway's Life) in which a 12-cell pattern can replicate itself -- after 12 generations there are 2 copies, after 36 ticks there are 4 copies, and so on. This pattern regularly evolves from random starting states.

There's even a rule, Fredkin's parity rule (B1357/S1257) where every possible pattern is a replicator -- an extreme example of replication being "just the way the universe works". But these replicators are, in some sense, too simple to be very interesting! They replicate the way crystals grow, and it's hard to harness that kind of low-level behavior. If you wanted a HighLife replicator with 13 cells, or one that would replicate in 13 ticks, instead of 12, you'd be out of luck. By comparison, the Gemini spaceship is extraordinarily adjustable.

will this pattern repair itself if anything happens to it? will it protect itself from outside influences? like a cell wall protects the inside of a cell?

No to all of the above. Conway's Life is not amenable to error-correction of this kind, because small changes have such huge consequences. Kind of like building machinery out of chunks of sub-critical enriched uranium: you can design it so that during normal operation the various pieces never come close enough together to start a chain reaction, but if any little thing goes wrong, you end up with high-energy particles flying all over the place, spreading the reaction to other nearby machinery, which then contributes to the explosion.

so how is it reconstructing itself in spite of the things around it?

Well, I didn't say "in spite of the things around it" -- it was "in spite of the way the universe normally works." The Life universe, for random patterns anyway, normally settles into a scattering of stable or P2-oscillating ash after a few hundred or a few thousand generations. There are any number of "lucky" self-perpetuating stationary and moving patterns that are exceptions to this general rule, but they're all very delicately balanced on the edge of chaos.

how is this anything but a different kind of glider?

The Gemini spaceship contains a large amount of data in its glider channels that is recognizably information about its own structure. Change that data, and the replicator unit will (usually) build something different. Most other gliders and spaceships in Conway's Life don't have anything like this -- all the other hundreds of patterns in Golly's Spaceships folder, or the tens of thousands in Koenig's Life Object database, are "naturally" self-perpetuating, because a future generation of the pattern happens to be identical to the original.

The Gemini spaceship has a significantly higher degree of control over its environment: with the right change to its program, a Gemini replicator unit could construct anything that can be built by colliding gliders, in any empty space in the Life universe. The Gemini contains most or all of the construction tools that a Conway's Life self-replicator will need; it's just a few short steps away from being a true replicator. Mostly it just doesn't have the right program -- yet.

There are a few other large patterns, especially Gabriel Nivasch's Caterpillar, that blur this line to some extent. However, the pi-climber "data" in the Caterpillar is much more difficult to reprogram than the gliders in the Gemini. Several new variants of the Gemini with different speeds and angles of travel have already been built -- with a lot of help from the Python scripts that Andrew Wade made available along with the pattern..

Re:I thought someone had a glider gun...

[Anonymous Coward]

And doesn't a glider do that?

A glider gun and a glider are not the same thing. The glider gun produces gliders, which have a different pattern than glider guns (ie the gliders that the glider gun shoots out cannot produce more gliders).

Second!

[Kell Bengal]

Self Replicating post! :-P
Self Replicating post! :-P

At least we can kill it

[Max Romantschuk]

Fortunately the glider gun is already discovered, so at least we have a means of killing this new self replicating entity. ;)

Re:At least we can kill it

[Cecil]

Except gliders are the very fuel it uses to grow and replicate! We're DOOMED!

Re:At least we can kill it

[weirdcrashingnoises]

Imagine for a moment that this ... thing is not anything that can be identified, because it prefers not to be. Wherever there is life, it brings death ... because it is evil. Absolute evil. ... Evil begets evil, shooting will only make it stronger.

Re:At least we can kill it

[jack2000]

Within the game of life when you shoot a glider at it the wrong way the whole thing brakes down in a nuclear explosion of death.

Most impressive and important pattern?

[Tacvek]

From the article:

In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.

Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[swordgeek]

Also from the article:

"...on the website Game of Life News."

Gee, do you think maybe the context was implicitly limited to patterns within the Game of Life?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Monkeedude1212]

I don't see whats impressive about it at all - but then again, I don't really see whats going on.

I mean, we've programmed robots that can build themselves if you give them the materials. I figured that was self replicating, and that was done a couple years ago.

So whats going on exactly thats impressive in this simulation?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[paskie]

And Score:4, Insightful? Of course the GP _was_ talking about patterns within the Game of Life itself.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[SomeJoel]

From the article:

In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.

Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.

Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[ari_j]

The impressive part seems to me to be that this pattern in Conway's Game of Life makes a copy of itself within the rules of the game. A robot designed to build a copy of itself does so within the much more flexible rules of real-world physics.

Then again, maybe the impressive thing is that there are people out there with enough time on their hands to run 34 million iterations of the Game of Life with enough different patterns to find this one.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

what robots? care to give a link? i only found this, which cannot create it's own building blocks: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/may05/selfrep.ws.html

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[TheRaven64]

Those are patterns in the game of life itself. The Turing Machine one is particularly impressive. It demonstrates that the game itself is a Turing-complete computation engine - the more complex version is a Universal Turing Machine, so you can encode any arbitrary algorithm on the 'tape' (a streak of cells that runs diagonally across the grid).

Given that it demonstrated the Turing completeness of the system, it's probably the most important pattern, as it shows that you can create a pattern with any algorithmic behaviour that you want. This includes providing a proof that the pattern discussed in TFA is possible, although not (of course) telling you how to create it. This pattern is interesting, but knowing that it's possible is more interesting than knowing exactly what it is.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

And those mentioned game of life patterns aren't patterns withint the Game of Life because???

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[falzer]

What are you talking about, non-existing? They both exist.

http://conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Universal_turing_machine
http://conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Turing_machine

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=P5760_unit_Life_cell

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[GooberToo]

Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.

Or arguably, it means you understand both sides of the coin and are open to discussion. No weaseling required.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[ukyoCE]

I've heard about the Turing machine pattern, do you have a link about the pattern that emulates the game itself?

I searched some but only found your comment and various crawler-spam "fact" sites that crawled a page briefly mentioning such a pattern exists. :P

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[badboy_tw2002]

Posting like a know-it-all without even the minimal attempt at verifying basic facts is a game everyone can play!

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Tacvek]

In case you missed the other person (falzer) who posted the link, the search term is "unit life cell", but the only page with an worthwhile detail I have seen is http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/patterns/unitcell/ucdesc.html

However falzer's link of http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=P5760_unit_Life_cell because it links to other interesting things.

One of those is Deep Cell which is a version of the pattern that simulates two independant life universes with a period of only 7680.

Another is the OTCA megapixel, which is a unit life cell that is larger and slower, but makes it much easier to see the state of each cell. It can also be program to follow any life-like pattern of number of neighbors needed for birth and starvation, as well as programmed to igore any (or all) of the eight bordering cells in its determination. so you could have a pattern that ignored diagonals. Of course the OTCA megapixel itself only runs under the standard rules.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[smellsofbikes]

From the article:

In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.

Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.

Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.

FUNNY! But at the same time, I think weasel words are critically important. Science should be based on weasel words: may, could, indicates, possibly, probably, likely. When you hear someone saying non-weasel words: is, will, shall, always -- you're either talking to God or to someone who talks to God. Mathematicians, for instance, which is why they can say that in base 10, two plus two IS four. But past that, I'm all for weasel words.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Spatial]

Wow, that's pretty amazing.

Not so amazing: I missed that and modded the guy up. Posting to undo. ;)

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[ukyoCE]

Wow. Thanks for the links!

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[swordgeek]

Well then, I stand corrected. (It ALWAYS hurts to say that, but...)

I didn't realise that a universal Turing machine had been implemented in Life. That is utterly cool, and in this context, the self-replicating pattern becomes a demonstration of the proof you point out.

I'd still say that the self-constructing pattern is in the top five, but maybe not #1 anymore.

Thanks for the education!

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! But does it run NetBSD?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Black Parrot]

Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.

Arguably.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Haxamanish]

I do not know what bot the GP is refering to, but here's a LEGO self-rep bot.

At what point is it "true self-replication"? Is the robot in the video sufficient? Or does it have to handle every distinct brick? Or does it have to be able to create its own bricks out of raw minerals?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[nedlohs]

And if you haven't seen something then it does not exist, right?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Toridas]

I agree. Weaseling out of things is an important thing to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, maybe the impressive thing is that there are people out there with enough time on their hands to run 34 million iterations of the Game of Life with enough different patterns to find this one.

Yes, and we call these people "computers." ;)

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[archmcd]

Like God?

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[PingPongBoy]

It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel

A worthy animal. Could be another Slashdot moderation category, alongside the troll, but with, let's say a random score ranging from +1 to -1.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[lomedhi]

...and you just proved that it is, in fact, "arguable".

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[dvgrn]

All of these patterns -- the Deep Cell, a 512x512 version of the original Unit Life Cell, and several samples of the OTCA metapixel -- are included in the pattern collection that comes with Golly. Check the "HashLife" folder for the metapixel examples, and the "Signal-Circuitry" folder for the others.

There's also a "metafier.py" Python script that lets you convert any selected pattern into an OTCA-metapixel pattern, and then run the results. Shouldn't be attempted on too large a starting pattern -- meta-metacells are a bit too much to ask for, and meta-Gemini-spaceships won't finish building in your lifetime! -- but it's surprising how big a metapattern Golly can handle, once it's been constructed.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[DMUTPeregrine]

FYI, http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm is the homepage of the GoL Turing machine. It was created back in 2000.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both already exist.
I'm looking at the Turing machine right now, and do you know what program it is running? The Turing machine version of Conway's game of life.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Ed Avis]

It's known that Life is Turing-complete, so it must be able to host a Turing machine or emulate itself. Making these patterns is an impressive engineering feat, but we already knew they were possible. The existence of a self-replicating pattern had been conjectured but not proven until now, I believe.

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[ari_j]

It's more that anyone bothered to try enough different starting patterns. I didn't mean to imply that anyone was running the simulation by hand. :P

Re:Most impressive and important pattern?

[Tacvek]

True, except that a square shaped unit life cell's possibility of existing is not guarenteed by the turring completeness. Wall that was guaranteed was that some form of emulation was possible.

Further now that both those old patterns and this new patter have been found/designed, which is more important? I mean we already knew self-replication in CA was possible, thanks to Von Neumann Universal constructor. All we did not know is if Conway's CA could support a self-replicator. (A universal constructor not being possible, thanks to orphan patterns.)

Re:Third!

[Anonymous Coward]

Self Replicating post! :-P
Self Replicating post! :-P
Self Replicating post! :-8

uh oh mutation...

Not to be a killjoy but...

[russotto]

If a new pattern is created while an old one is destroyed, it's not self-replicating; it's just moving.

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[Binder]

You mean like a human giving birth to another human and then dying off?

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

More like REALLY slow teleportation (ala Star Trek)

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[russotto]

You mean like a human giving birth to another human and then dying off?

If every time one human was born, an identical human died, it would be like that.

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot -- some people here think that's actually how it works, while many more think births are all faked by the government, and still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[Migala77]

still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.

The internet is for 'more openness in the early stages of the process'!

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trying to imply something about the roles of the people in the Teleport room?

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[nacturation]

still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.

The internet is for 'more openness in the early stages of the process'!

So that explains all the porn?

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[city]

Right, but it looks like it is the way it moves that is important. Where all others before it moved in specific direction, this one disassembles and reassembles itself in a new location. Apparently important if you are trying to create CA that builds things.

-from TFA "As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born (see diagram)."

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[ukyoCE]

Yes. Humans wouldn't be terribly interesting creatures if that's all they could do, would they? All we'd have in the world is 1 human, "Eve", who keeps dying after birthing a new Eve.

Now a human giving birth to *multiple* humans and then dying off? THAT is what makes life "life". I'm pretty sure this is the expected definition of self replication - an entity creating multiple copies of itself before dying. This gives us robust exponential growth. In the Eve scenario, as soon as any one Eve dies before giving birth, the entire "species" is dead.

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[OneAhead]

I would swear every single time a New Scientist article appears on Slashdot, TFA either has a very crucial detail completely wrong, or is about a theory that is extremely controversial in its field, or is a "sciencevertisement" for a technique people have been using for decades. Even if we assume the Slashdot crowd is phenomenally good at catching them every single time they do something like this, it happens at a worrisome pace.

I'm acquiring a knee-jerk reflex to roll my eyes whenever I see a Slashdot post link to New Scientist. It's, like, the tabloid of Pop Sci.

Re:Not to be a killjoy but...

[martin-boundary]

Isn't that more properly referred to as teleporting? Zeno would have something to say about moving in a discrete world made up of indivisible cells.

that's what the entire universe is:

[circletimessquare]

some alien 43 dimensional child's entry in the local science fair

"look: i've created self-replicating life based on a few simple rules!"

and the judge says: "but it's only 4 dimensions, and one of the dimensions is only one way. shoddy, very simplistic, not a good middle school level effort"

to which the alien's mom says: "don't worry honey, next year we'll put baking soda and vinegar in a paper mache cone and simulate a volcano!"

and the alien child says: "that's ok mom, i don't like science anymore, i want to be a ranch hand. bye bye, little universe critters, i always thought you were cute"

and then he pulls the plug on his simulation, and trillions of animal, plant, and human lives on earth and septillions of lives on the other inhabited planets cease to exist in a puff

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's just a 4 dimensional being 'painting' on a 3 dimensional 'surface'.

Wrap your head around that one.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[AhabTheArab]

Or maybe it's just a 4 dimensional being 'painting' on a 3 dimensional 'surface'.

Wrap your head around that one.

Let me take a few hits of acid and I'll try.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[FeepingCreature]

Don't worry. All that's needed for a pattern to persist is for it to be self-consistent. All the alien kid did was break the connection to his computing device. Life goes on. (See also: Permutation City)

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[TheHawke]

Oh man, that just made me get uneasy there for a while. Fantastic piece of writing you have done! You really should consider building that skill up and start submitting manuscripts.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[tom17]

That's nothing, I read of one planet in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole, killed ten billion people.

Only scored thirty points too.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[nacturation]

Mod parent up (not troll). I thought it was a decent very tiny sci-fi story.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd like 'The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag' by Heinlein (apologies if I've spelled anyone's name wrong).

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[hotkey]

That's nothing, I read of one planet in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole, killed ten billion people. Only scored thirty points too.

Where did you read that?

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why, once you start the game of life, you shouldn't turn it off.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[ZzzzSleep]

Greg Egan FTW!

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear there is a new algorithm to answer this. But I'll ask anyway. Sarcasm?

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[tom17]

Oh, a book.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until you see his newsletter.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, this is just a rehashed idea similar to the endings of both the men in black films. Like we're just a universe inside a giant marble that aliens play w/ for keeps. Where did I hear that one? Hmmmmmmmm.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

cool story bro!

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[tom17]

Silly mods, funny for the wrong reasons i'm sure.

Re:that's what the entire universe is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Did comprehending that just make me a destroyer of worlds?

(Btw, regarding the subject.. given possible future breakthroughs, should a 'glider' be the proper unit in terms of measuring the size of an apparatus, or should something more abstract be used?)

-j

Woohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

This definitely sets the stage for Cold Fusion to become reality.

Re:Woohoo!

[djdanlib]

I thought people moved on from writing apps with that long ago ;)

For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[JoshuaZ]

The Game of Life is one of the first cellular automata discovered that had simple rules but complicated behavior. The rules very roughly mimic bacterial growth. One has an infinite lattice grid, and some starting set of cells on the grid are designated as alive (every cell on the grid is either alive or dead). Each new generation is made by the following four rules: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies. Any living cell with more than three live neighbors dies. Any living cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. Any dead cell with three live neighbors (exactly) becomes a live cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

The Game of Life is mathematically interesting because it can be shown to be Turing complete. That is, if you have a process that tells you whether any given starting configuration will eventually dieout then you can answer whether any given computer program will eventually halt. In general, there's a theorem known as the Turing Halting Theorem which says that no general procedure exists to do that for all programs.

Prior to the work in TFA, there were known configurations called "gliders" which could replicate themselves as they moved across the grid, but they only left the same number of copies. There were also configurations which could spawn gliders (called glider guns). However, no configuration that was actually self-replicating in the sense of spawning more copies of itself was known. This work by Andrew Wade shows how to make configurations that do self-replicate. His original announcement is at http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 and the actual configuration can be found at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en&pli=1 Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.

Als

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.

Or even 40!

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Ether]

Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine, not that it is able to solve the Turing halting problem; a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Vasheron]

Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine

Correct, that is the definition of what it means to be Turing-complete.

a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.

Wrong, assuming a system can perform all the functions of a Turing machine we can prove that said system is unable to solve the Halting Problem by assuming that it does, and proceeding to obtain a contradiction. You are confusing theorems with definitions - a subtle, but important distinction exists.

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Anonymous Coward]

You are basically saying the same thing he is, that the halting problem cannot be solve (which to be true, you need to add "in the general case"). Secondly, he isn't confused, you are. The concepts of "Turning Complete" and the "Halting Problem" are distinct. I believe you are just trying to regurgitate concepts that your professors lectured about to appear educated. You fail.

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[vanyel]

Sorry, the operation could not be performed. Please try again later.

You've reached the bandwidth limit for viewing or downloading files that aren't in Google Docs format. Please try again later.

It's pretty bad when Google gets slashdotted!

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Vasheron]

The concepts of "Turning Complete" and the "Halting Problem" are distinct.

Where did I say otherwise? This was exactly the point I was trying to make. I was not arguing against with the fact that a Turing machine cannot solve the Halting Problem. I was arguing with the GP's implied assertion that the fact that a language cannot describe a solution to the Halting Problem is part of the definition of what it means to be Turing-complete. Yes, it was an extremely pedantic and nitpicky thing to do - I'll admit that - but, I am correct. One must prove that Turing machines cannot solve the Halting Problem in order to state it as fact.

I believe you are just trying to regurgitate concepts that your professors lectured about to appear educated. You fail.

I hold a BS in mathematics (with honors) and a minor in computer science from a good university. I have won numerous awards and national scholarships on the basis of my demonstrated ability. I consider multivariate calculus bedtime reading. If that is failure, what exactly do I have to do in order to succeed?

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed his point. He said that if you could solve the "dieout problem" for the Game of Life, then it would let you solve the Halting problem for a universal turing machine, which (according to the Turing Halting Theorem) is impossible.

In other words, the Turing Halting problem can be reduced to the Game of Life, so insights we gain about the Game of Life will give us insights into the domain of Universal Turing Machines too. That is why its mathematically interesting.

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Anonymous Coward]

so turing-complete language (or system) is a language (or system) which is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system?
i think i'm a turing-complete language (or system).

Re:For those who don't know about the Game of Life

[Warbothong]

There's some really fascinating research going on with Cellular Automata by Biologists and Chemists. For instance Seeman, Winfree and others have investigated building cellula automata cells directly out of DNA, and encoding the rules of the CA as dangling "sticky ends". This means that as the cells float around in a test tube (or whatever) they have single strands of DNA reaching out into the solution. If two of these strands come together which have complementary bases (they are designed to complement if they represent a valid rule application) then they pair up to form a double strand, which sticks the two cells together. This makes a physical cellular automata, where a spatial dimension is incremented in place of time.

For a non-in-depth video see here http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/paul_rothemund_details_dna_folding.html

For a bit more meat you can see a physical cellular automata made of DNA here http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl0722830
and a discussion of the computational power of DNA crystallisation here http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/self-assem.pdf . There is LOADS of cool research on this here http://www.dna.caltech.edu/DNAresearch_publications.html

I'm fascinated by this stuff, and used it as the topic for a University essay that I may as well shamelessly promote here http://chriswarbo.webs.com/DNAEssay.pdf ;)

WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[Rockoon]

My favorite CA is WireWorld. The designs in the CA look and behave like circuit boards. People have designed some very complex "computers" in it.

WireWorld on Wikipedia

This flash-based wireworld app is listing prime numbers.

Re:WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[schon]

Awesome!

I remember reading about this 20 years ago in (IIRC) Omni.. it was an introduction to circuitry (it used the rules as an example to demonstrate logic gates.) I didn't know it had a name, and while I always thought it would be a cool thing to code (now that I can) I'd never thought someone had actually done it... thanks for the links! :)

Re:WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[drinkypoo]

Am I supposed to do anything but hit play on the prime number generator? It loads for me, and the counter in the corner of the screen goes up, but nothing happens.

Re:WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[Rockoon]

It takes a few hundred thousand iterations between each of the early primes.

Re:WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you'd have to run it for days to see, "1" pop out? That little speed slider needs to scale a bit more. Like 5,000% more. :)

Re:WireWorld is more fun to play with.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is awesome. These CAs really blow my mind.

Conway?

[atrain728]

Pretty sure LIFE it was created by Milton Bradley. Mine doesn't spawn any self replicating creatures though :(.

Re:Conway?

[gnieboer]

What, you never landed on the "you've had a baby, collect presents" block?

I suppose there wasn't a loop from selling the kids to having the kids go to "start".

Re:Third!

[jgagnon]

uh oh mutation...

That's evolution. :p

Monsatan

[tepples]

It's the Monsanto strain.

It's the Monsatan satan.

Re:Monsatan

[M8e]

It's the mosanta stanan

Re:Monsatan

[Miseph]

It's Hannah Montana.

OH GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?

Kill it with fire, kill it with fire!

And not even that...

[Anonymous Coward]

It only copies once, because it needs a whole "tape" of instructions that gets fed to it from outside.

Nymphomation anyone?!

[kennedy]

PLAY TO WIN! PLAY TO WIN!

Displacement not Self-Replicating

[porter235]

Yep, and if you read the entry on LifeWiki you would see they agree with you.

"It displaces itself by 5120 cells vertically and 1024 cells horizontally every 33,699,586 generations."

Re:Third!

[durrr]

Evolution is the preservation of beneficial traits, only time can tell if :-8 will survive to establish a new species or if it will die off after a few generations.

Second!

[ilsaloving]

Self Replicating post! :-P
Self Replicating post! :-P
--
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them

Re:Third!

[zill]

That's obviously intelligent design. Burn the heathen!

Google Docs is slashdotted... Alternate download

[gbrayut]

The Google Docs page with the Gemini.zip file is not allowing any more downloads right now. Here is another link with more info about Gemini and an alternate download hosted on drop.io. Follow the instructions on page 2 of the original article to set it up.

Is there a video?

[b4dc0d3r]

The article has steps to reproduce this, but does anyone have a video or animated gif or something for those of us who are interested, but not this interested?

I just copied the text to illustrate the steps involved, for those unfamiliar with how articles work the article has more information along with the links.

See Gemini in action

You can run Gemini on your own computer: just follow these simple instructions.

First, install Golly, a Game of Life simulator, by downloading and unzipping this folder from SourceForge. This will give you a folder called golly-2.1-win, which contains a number of sub-folders.

Next, get a copy of Gemini by downloading and unzipping this document from Google Docs. Save the resulting file, which is called gemini.rle, inside the golly-2.1-win/Patterns sub-folder.

Now double-click "Golly" in the golly-2.1-win folder to start the software. The program icon should be a yellow square with patterns of blue dots on it.

Go to File/Open Pattern and select the Gemini file. You should end up with a white diagonal line, going from top-left to bottom-right, on a black background.

You'll need to choose an algorithm with which to run the Game of Life. Simply go to Control/Set Algorithm and choose "HashLife".

Next, set the speed at which the simulation will run. To do this, press the "+" key four times. In the blue bar at the top, you should see "Step = 8^0" change to "Step = 8^4".

Now you're all set: just click the play button in the top-left corner to start the simulation.

If you hover your mouse over the top-left corner of the screen, Golly will give you controls allowing you to zoom in and out, and to move around. All the interesting stuff is at the top-left and bottom-right of the white diagonal line, and you'll need to zoom in a few steps.

I for one...

[sneakyimp]

I for one welcome our tape-populating overlords.

Is it really Gemini...

[russotto]

...or is it, in fact, The Schizoid Man?

Re:Third!

[blair1q]

Evolution is the preservation of beneficial traits

Wrong.

Evolution is the preservation of non-detrimental traits.

This proves intelligent design!!

[robcozzens]

From TFA: "It might help us understand how life on Earth began..."

So God is some pimply-faced kid programming away in his mom's basement?

Re:Third!

[raving griff]

Considering the +5 Funny score, I would say the trait is quite beneficial.

GulfSniper

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble with tribbles...

Re:Third!

[durrr]

Detrimental traits such as lactose-intolerance can be preserved if there is no or weak evolutionary pressure for this trait. But over time and changing enviroments it's the beneficial traits that are more likely to preserve the genotype.
A better wording is perhaps that the enviromental viability of a geno and phenotype is what is the driving force behind evolution.

Re:Third!

[medcalf]

Well, from your comment, :-8 is already spawning. Um, twice now.

How life on Earth began

[Arancaytar]

What?

That sentence sounds like bullshit inserted to make the story appealing to people who aren't interested in the maths. Like the virus reference in the start. "Ooh, self-replicating; it's like DNA." It's the same thing that makes quantum physicists groan when the word "teleportation" is mentioned.

This is a fascinating pattern, but there is nothing magical, otherworldly or philosophical about it.

Game Mirror

[no1nose]

I want to play this. Does anyone have a mirror for the game portion of the download here: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en

Google says the account has exceeded its bandwidth limits.

toggle overdrive

[Chirs]

beside the rabbit is the radiation-looking thing. Toggle it and it runs 100x faster.

The number 2 pops out at around 11000 or so.

Next step, gender?

[damien_kane]

Since this takes 2 sources (the constructor, and the tape) the next step, obviously, is to make it (depending on the values entered through the tape) generate either a new constructor or a new tape.

Either feed the new constructor a new (potentially different) tape, and see what comes out, or feed the new tape to an existing constructor.

Run ad infinitum until the game is over (either no further replication, or a full life-area), divide the number of generations by 34 million, and extrapolate how many more generations humans have.

Re:Third!

[aliquis]

Evolution did what it "should" had done, got rid of the damn 8. p was clearly superior.

But one do have to ask oneself how the fuck could :-P become ;] !? That's just to freaky, something else must have interfered, neither of the new characters are even in the first one!

Good thing

[mangu]

Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?

If not being paid removes the incentive to create new products, then how do you explain Linux, or any other Free Software?

Not getting paid to do it means that products, entertainment, information, ideas will be created not for the necessity of earning a living, but for love of the product.

Imagine a world where anyone is free to create exactly what he or she wants, the way it should be done, not being constrained by a boss. Imagine you having access to all those creations, being able to choose freely which one you like best, not having to worry about the price.

Re:Good thing

[bunratty]

If not being paid removes the incentive to create new products, then how do you explain Linux, or any other Free Software?

I think most development on most open source products is done by paid full-time programmers. In the case of Firefox, the work is mostly done by Mozilla developers who get money from Google because Google is the default search engine. If goods are free, Google can't advertise goods, Mozilla's money dries up, and Firefox development slows way down.

Re:Good thing

[mattack2]

If not being paid removes the incentive to create new products, then how do you explain Linux, or any other Free Software?

They're not being paid directly in money, but AFAIK many projects started out as something the originator wanted to do better/faster. So even though they weren't being paid in money, they were (expecting) to indirectly be paid in greater productivity or more free time or something like that. ...and the fact that they aren't being directly paid (as in money) is a reason many give for things like "why hasn't Linux taken off on the desktop" or "why doesn't [OpenOffice|that GNU Photoshop-ish program|etc] take off and replace $EXPENSIVEPROPRIETARYSOFTWARE".

Does the child eventually spawn it's own kinder?

[Anonymous Coward]

Setting up a fancy pattern of 3 sub-patterns, so that you end up with a 4th sub-pattern, I'm not sure I would call that self-replicating.

If the 3 patterns can make a 4th, and then that 4th (plus 2 others?) can go on to make a 5th, etc, THEN you've got something. Otherwise it's all just transitory effects of your initial conditions, and a lot of double-speak...

Re:Third!

[TheDarkMaster]

How many generations to grey post goo cover the world?

Re:Third!

[geekoid]

the traits don't have to be beneficial. That can be harmful but only have an effect after procreation. There are species that die after procreation. ell me how having your head eaten by your mate is in anyway helpful to you?

dying from old age springs to mind. stupid stupid aging. Cure it all ready people.

Permutation City - Greg Egan

[PhunkySchtuff]

This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level... I'm not going to spoil it any more, get a copy and read it.

Check it out on The Book Depository

Re:Permutation City - Greg Egan

[julesh]

This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level...

Interesting. I've not read any other books by the author, but I've just finished Schild's Ladder, which is about life in an area of the universe with alternative physical laws, which are described as very similar to rules for cellular automata. The life forms are basically patterns in a network of connected nodes which cause a similar pattern to arise nearby when the rules for iterating the network are followed. Couldn't help thinking about Game of Life while reading it...

Re:Permutation City - Greg Egan

[PhunkySchtuff]

Greg Egan has explored a lot of concepts around the nature of existence and self, and what it means to be you when you are simulated on a computer, or run on a backup processor in your head... He's a programmer by trade so has a very solid understanding of the concepts behind it all and he's got a rather advanced understanding of mathematics which also shines through in his work.

I highly recommend checking out some of his earlier works. If you're into maths and physics, then some of his later works, in particular Incandesence details life in a non-Newtonian reference frame and working out physical laws of the universe from first principles.

He's got a very rich back catalogue. His earlier works are a fair bit more accessible than some of his later stuff, less maths involved and you can see a definite progression as you work forward from his earlier works to those written later in his career. The collections of short stories are well worth picking up, some of his short stories pack as much into them as other authors manage to fit into an entire novel.

TechnoCore AIs

[Oricalchos]

Welcome, Big Mistake of '08. Pun intended.

Great grandma

[frazras]

it took 24 million generations, the great ^1000000 grandma must be proud.... but wait how did she become a grandma if she could reproduce?

Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror pleeease!

EMH?

[toastar]

"To get medical treatment, you would need money. ".

Well that's until you replicate an android doctor.

Re:Third!

[andi75]

Sorry to nitpick, but a trait that gives you a +Funny moderation is not benefitial, since Funny doesn't give you Karma. In fact, you risk losing Karma that way by alternately getting modded +Funny and -Overrated / -Redundant.

Now a trait that would give you a +Informative or +Insightful, that would be benefitial.

Re:Third!

[Bozzio]

Well, on my keyboard it would be:
Mutation by 1, Deletion, Mutation by 2.

Not so far fetched, really.

Re:Third!

[jesset77]

GAH!!! turn it off, turn it off! :-8 is having sex with your eyeballs to reproduce itself!

Meh

[Stormy Dragon]

Conway's Game of Life isn't particularly interesting. It would have died out if it weren't for the far better sequel. Of course, Conway's Game of Life 3 is the one that really got everyone playing. Then the lousy Conway's Game of Life 4 came out and killed off the whole series.