Glider
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You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
I understand it's the game of life but I don't understand much about it, how does it work?
Why was it chosen to be the emblem for hackers?
Because it's basically the first self-sustained moving "life" in the game of life. It's also the smallest.
There, now you can use the symbol and pretend you're part of an elite club. Have fun feeling snide.
>>54609772
what's the ruleset for this 3d one?
>>54609793
>Because it's basically the first self-sustained moving "life" in the game of life. It's also the smallest.
I see that. I've read up on it but I can't figure out the algorithm. What makes it tick?
>>54609807
The exact same as for 2d?
>>54609809
you can come back after you've read at very least this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
>>54609807
Y is time
I was severely disappointed after I found out what conways game of life is.
From the name I thought it would be a slightly more involved thing judging from the pretentious name, I do not know what I anticipated but at least something more than this.
I have never heard it used as an emblem of anything.
>>54609858
>disappointed
dude, it's super cool
ur just dumb
>>54609865
I just feel more intrigued by less in lack of better words obvious systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_lwq3BfkY
>>54609948
Conway's game of life is just cool because of the amount of complexity which arises out of apparently simple rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
>>54609983
that is pretty dank I have to admit
>>54609983
duuude
>>54609983
>We are but tiny dots on a endless timeline
>>54609983
bumb because this is awesome
post more
I don't know if I should call you dumbasses for not getting it. I mean you might have valid reasons not to feel awe for this (though it is not the 4chan way to admit this, and definetely not the stupid short-sighted /g/ way).
Its about emergent complexity. What amazes me is how a simple rule such as b3/s23 can actually spawn complex patterns that have a definite behaviour. For one part I think it's fairly natural since it's seen in several other systems like the game of go and the very configuration of electrical charges in your processor.
But, still, the first time one realizes this it is absolutely amazing, to have such a simplistic set of rules actually spawn behaviour that turns out to be turing complete. When I first saw gliders, though, I thought they were just a curiosity. What got my attention was the glider gun. Essentially it keeps spawning gliders at regular intervals. Other interesting patterns that emerge are still lifes. But the engineering goes far beyond that. When you run GoL with a random initial configuration you're just likely to see some blobs devolve into still lifes and gliders. But then you see somebody actually managed to make a turing machine in GoL, and the golly devs actually made a pattern that spawns their logo as a bunch of spaceships.
There's more though, there's the self-replication problem, which has been recently solved in GoL but also present in other rules, starting from the work by, yes, Von Neumann.
Why the glider? This intrigues me too, it has to do with information theory. this 3x3 grid of dots and white cells actually encodes all the above information in a very succint way, and it is a pattern that arises naturally in its own right.
So that's why I like it.
>>54610727
Honestly I favour the *sh fork bomb:(){ :|:& };:
over the glider, for similar reasons, only that this doesn't arise naturally but it is deliberately engineered, obscure (almost like black magic) at first sight, obvious when somebody explains it to you, and it relates closely to the UNIX system and the command line.
Addendum. While everybody shits in /g/ by being dumb I do it by actually giving honest answers, and of course blogging
>>54610727
>>54610747
Of course I can relate because I am a symbol freak myself. A symbol can carry a lot of information, in incremental ways each time. That's why I (and I believe many people) find beauty in symbols like Euler's identity (e to the power i pi); they also kind of join the people of a community by sort of identifying with these symbols and they're foreign for somebody not in that culture. Take pic related for example. Everybody here knows this picture and immediately gets it, and even associates it with some stuff, good or bad, but if you get it it's a safe bet to say that you're a part of this community.
These are the best kinds of symbols imo. You could also identify with other members of a group through a mascot, like Tux, but that's just a trademark really, it doesn't itself convey any of the spirit of the linux community as some other more native symbol would (like the fork bomb does for it's superset: the UNIX kultur)
>>54609809
Create a graph of cells where each cell shares an edge with neighboring cells. Each cell has a variable which determines if it is alive or dead and also a function which examines if it's neighboring cells are alive or dead. Have that function tally up all neighboring living cells and kill or revive that cell depending on that tally. This might be difficult as a first time project but you should try it out if you have some free time. I believe in you, anon.
