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'Tetris' Recreated In Conway's 'Game of Life' (stackexchange.com)
In 1970 mathematician John Conway created rules for the "Game of Life," a now famous "zero-player game" where a grid of cells evolves (following Conway's rules) from an initial state proposed by the player. In 2013 someone challenged readers of StackExchange's "Programming Puzzles & Code Golf" section to devise an initial state "that will allow for the playing of a game of Tetris."
An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that "This challenge sat around, gathering upvotes but no answer, for four years. Then, it was answered." Citing the work of seven contributors, a massive six-part response says their solution took one and a half years to create, and "began as a quest but ended as an odyssey." The team created their own assembly language, known as QFTASM (Quest for Tetris Assembly) for use within Conway's mathematical universe, and then also designed their own processor architecture, and eventually even a higher-level language that they named COGOL. Their StackExchange response includes a link to all of their code on GitHub, as well as to a page where you can run the code online.
One StackExchange reader hailed the achievement as "the single greatest thing I've ever scrolled through while understanding very little."
An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that "This challenge sat around, gathering upvotes but no answer, for four years. Then, it was answered." Citing the work of seven contributors, a massive six-part response says their solution took one and a half years to create, and "began as a quest but ended as an odyssey." The team created their own assembly language, known as QFTASM (Quest for Tetris Assembly) for use within Conway's mathematical universe, and then also designed their own processor architecture, and eventually even a higher-level language that they named COGOL. Their StackExchange response includes a link to all of their code on GitHub, as well as to a page where you can run the code online.
One StackExchange reader hailed the achievement as "the single greatest thing I've ever scrolled through while understanding very little."
And piss on your grave? lol
Conway's game of Life has been shown to be Turing Complete, so it can do anything any computer can do. You can use glider generators to construct a NAND gate, and then use NAND gates to construct any logic circuit, including a CPU.
Someone should write a compiler to run arbitrary software inside the automaton system.
last april?..better late than never.. phlame on.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZsAyA5FlLk ..unexciting would be an understatement,, the truth frequently lacks dramatic theatrical or commercial value.....
"I Hate Nerds!" - Ogre
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It will provide insight into development of other more advanced projects.
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I ran the code online, but can't find a way to see the lowest level of their stack, where the GoL is actually running?
I'd also love to see their VM running!
board, up the hills and dale, and maybe meet Vanna, or Pat, and by all means, avoid the COGOL? Is that how this game plays?
https://xkcd.com/505/
Conway's Game of Life is indeed Turing Complete (see also: A New Kind of Science) and this is indeed pretty awesome that they were able to do this...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
This is the next step on the career ladder for enterprising redstone engineers everywhere. Anyone who can design a CPU in Minecraft should be able to do it in GoL, if they have all the extensions. The lack of a NOT gate is a bit of a pisser, but can be worked around. It seems to me if you really want a NOT gate, you can use an XOR gate and constantly pull one line high. Maybe they don't have any ways to constantly pull a line high either.
Seriously though, I would not be surprised at all if the major contributors to this project started out hacking redstone.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
OK, time for the next challenge. Once GCC is done, port Doom to the GoL, it is open sourced so.... Since speed is indeed an issue, part 2 of this challenge is to compile it to an FPGA so it runs at a decent speed. :)
Please note there is no rush for this challenge, next week will be just fine.
Eventually entropy will destroy the universe. Even if you've survived normal human mortality, the end of the Earth, and the end of the Sun (etc, etc, etc)... ultimately absolutely nothing you've ever achieved will have any significance whatsoever.
These guys had fun doing something difficult just to do it, and they didn't hurt anybody else in the process. THAT is actually the most significant thing you can manage in our universe. Just deal with the fact that you're less important than they are and get on with the remainder of your meaningless existence.
You haven't played Tetris until you played Tetris in 3D blocks.
I thought using the 7 standard pieces in a Tetris clone was ruled in 2012 to be a copyright infringement.
I think CA is by far the most interesting thing being done today in math and physics.
I agree. Life was a popular topic even back in the 1970's with low res screens. Writing simulators using VGA graphics modes and graphics accelerators was always the first things I did. Going beyond CA, there are 3D reaction diffusion equations.
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Stack Exchange gives credit to the author of every question and answer. It's a requirement of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license under which contributors offer their work.
As for "profit", are you talking about a paywall? Because people use tracking blockers nowadays to keep ad networks from stalking them with "retargeting", and unless you sell your own site's ad space directly to advertisers, you won't see a dime from them. Or what am I missing?
> 'Tetris' Recreated In Conway's 'Game of Life'
OK, it is late, but I have read that a dozen times now and I don't quite understand. "Recreated" belongs to one or possibly more than one Tetris? What kind of English is that? Are they trying to make a contraction like "Tetris is" by adding a trailing apostrophe?
>"OK, it is late, but I have read that a dozen times now and I don't quite understand."
And now I see the problem- the freaky font blended the leading apostrophe into the "T." I wish I could post a screenshot of it; it really is quite amazing.
I need to go to bed :)
..Then we can reinvent the Web so we can make use of sockets and application streams as Web services instead of natively compiled applications and single points of failure. So much ad-hoc stuff out there right now!
This comment has been closed as non-constructive. Due to the number of low quality replies, over 9000 internet points are required to post reply.
Does anyone else remember the game "Sharks and Fish", source came out in Byte Magazine I think back in the 80's. Very interesting, and turns out it replicates the ebb and flow of the populations of lynx and rabbits as tracked by Canadian Fur Company trapping statistics back in the 1700's :-)
Much more interesting than Conway's Life, I always thought. I hacked it, of course, to add plankton, whales, porpoises, and things got quite interesting then :-)
The people involved have gained insight and experience, but the state of the art has not advanced significantly to have an assembly language implemented in Life metacells. It was already widely known that it could be done. It's a curiosity, like writing a Brainfuck JIT compiler or a .mod player in bash, both of which I've done just to see if I could.
Why climb a mountain? Because it's there.
I couldn't figure out how to actually move or rotate the blocks. Arrow keys, WASD,...? No effect. So the blocks just seem to scroll down in the middle and stack up.
The authors don't seem to mention the controls, except something about "manually editing the contents of RAM address".... ??
Doesn't "allow for the playing of a game of Tetris" mean that you can actually, y'know, *play* Tetris?
"something useful"
that is a bad criteria for judging anything, for several reasons. such judges assume too much and are hubristic.
who defines "usefulness"? you? society? based on what data, given there are lots of unknowns and knowledge is never complete? how to decide? majority? will of powerful? those who pay? known immediate needs? speculative long term needs? etc etc.
rather let individuals exercise their free will as they see fit , even if they do something that seems "useless", or in some cases even "harmful" to themselves, as long as they do not curtail others' free will directly..
Just think of what could have been achieved if they had put that effort into something useful.
Like posting on Slashdot? You really showed them.
They could be playing Tetris in a game of life simulating a game of life in a game of life simulating life. ...
These guys made something awesome, but didn't upload a youtube video of it.
It was one of the first programs that I wrote in my Atari computer.I was really into this stuff back in grade school and high school, but was ultimately turned off by a well intentioned physics teacher and a possible misunderstanding on my part. Anyway, if I was starting all over, this is what I would be studying right now.
Just think of what could have been achieved if they had put that effort into something useful.
I wonder if I could get a research grant to make sure water is wet in all countries.
Why don't you just fuck off and never return?
That would be quite useful for everyone else.
Can't systemd play tetis and life already?
well someone had to say it.
How far off is that?
This is really awesome. Now that you are started, could you switch to the Game of Half-Life? Some people are waiting.