Talk:Conway's Game of Life/Archive 2

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I've tagged the list of Conway's criteria as needing a better source. A "private communication" to a mailing list might not be impossible to verify, but it's pretty hard; searching for

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

Dang. Thanks for looking, though!

talk

) 18:48, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

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

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

talk

) 03:13, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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