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The Tamagochi Singularity Made Real: Infinite Tamagochi Living On the Internet (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Everyone loves Tamagochi, the little electronic keychains spawned in the '90s that let you raise digital pets. Some time ago, XKCD made a quip about an internet-based matrix of thousands of these digital entities. That quip is now a reality thanks to elite hardware hacker Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM). In his recent talk called "The Tamagochi Singularity" at the Hackaday SuperConference he revealed that he had built an infinite network of virtual Tamagochi by implementing the original hardware as a virtual machine. This included developing AI to keep them happy, and developing a protocol to emulate their IR interactions. But he went even further, hacking an original keychain to use wirelessly as a console which can look in on any of the virtual Tamagochi living on his underground network. This full-stack process is unparalleled in just about every facet: complexity, speed of implementation, awesome factor, and will surely spark legions of other Tamagochi Matrices.
Yes, I am rather indifferent to them. I guess that comes from having had real pets. Now, the Tamagothi on the other hand, that was just cool. Reminds me of Elmyra from Tiny Tunes and that peculiar hair-tie that she wore...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Its going to be something like this that will bring along the the AI uprising, innocent infinite Tamagochi matrix develops a glitch and hello Robotic Tamagotchi uprising!
I just know it!
No sig here...
I watched the presentation to determine how he generalized it to infinity. I was disappointed. No automatic deduplication tricks, no stochastic modeling, no lazy seeded generation+fast forward. Just infinity approximated by 13. Simulating an infinite number of them starting in pseudorandom states is an interesting and tractable problem (the communication makes it harder: if you want it to be interesting, you need to not have a disconnected communication graph because that would be lame), but not one addressed here.
If you start them all synchronized, you could easily have an infinite list of them, and they talk to one neighbor then the other: the result would be all the ones in even indexed slots would be identical, and same for the odd slots (all are in one of 2 states). I believe this should generalize to n-dimensional grids in interesting ways.