Since Conway's Life is Turing Complete (IIRC), it would be theoretically possible for someone to write a compiler for it, no?
This seems obviously very hard, but since this seems to be catching up, how long until someone decides it's "easier" to write some sort of language + compiler that outputs the initial state needed to do whatever you want in a Life's board?
On another note...this is truly mind-blasting. So, what else do people like him/her do when looking for a challenge? I can't even start to fathom what kind of intelligence level do you need for this, let alone imagine what would I find challenging if I were able to reach these level of mental performance.
Or maybe it's just my puny brain trying to make sense of it... but it just seems so amazing to me the type of minds that you can encounter when public forums like SO are there for almost everyone to access.
Not that it isn't impressive, but it begins to make much more sense how one would go about this once you realize there are higher level functional pieces studied in Conway's GOL. Thinking about the solution in terms of just the rules to the game would require beyond-human intelligence (I speculate); but if you can use these higher level constructions, it's reasonable depending on how well you know them. E.g., from his response:
It uses p30 technology. Just basic things, gliders and lightweight spaceships
> Since Conway's Life is Turing Complete (IIRC), it would be theoretically possible for someone to write a compiler for it, no?
Does Turing completeness matter for this? I can see how it might matter if the question was about writing a compiler IN Life, but not for writing a compiler FOR Life.
Computation is what the compiler would get you to start, another aspect would be to tie that to display somehow. The clock here had to be visually displayed. So some sort of display driver situation is needed that is drivable from the compute engine.
There are basic units that were discovered and then those lead to more abstract/complex structures like what we're seeing here.
"Collision-Based Computing" may be of interest to you. (Springer's prices are outrageous, but you may be able to get it via interlibrary loan.)
https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781852335403
This seems obviously very hard, but since this seems to be catching up, how long until someone decides it's "easier" to write some sort of language + compiler that outputs the initial state needed to do whatever you want in a Life's board?
On another note...this is truly mind-blasting. So, what else do people like him/her do when looking for a challenge? I can't even start to fathom what kind of intelligence level do you need for this, let alone imagine what would I find challenging if I were able to reach these level of mental performance.
Or maybe it's just my puny brain trying to make sense of it... but it just seems so amazing to me the type of minds that you can encounter when public forums like SO are there for almost everyone to access.