I performed the same experiment with glider guns and got the same result “stalagmite of ash” result.
I didn’t use that name for it, but I instantly recognized my result under that description <3
When I performed that experiment, I was relatively naive about physics and turing machines and so on, and sort of didn’t have the “more dakka” gut feeling that you can always try crazier things once you have granted that you’re doing math, and so infinities are as nothing to your hypothetical planning limits. Applying that level of effort to Conway’s Life… something that might be interesting would be to play with 2^N glider guns in parallel, with variations in their offsets, periodicities, and glider types, for progressively larger values of N? Somewhere in all the variety it might be possible to generate a “cleaning ray”?
If fully general cleaning rays are impossible, that would also be an interesting result! (Also, it is the result I expect.)
My current hunch is that a “cleaning ray with a program” (that is allowed to be fed some kind of setup information full of cheat codes about the details of the finite ash that it is aimed at) might be possible.
Then I would expect there to be a lurking result where there was some kind of Maxwell’s Demon style argument about how many bits of cheatcode are necessary to clean up how much random ash… and then you’re back to another result confirming the second law of thermodynamics, but now with greater generality about a more abstract physics? I haven’t done any of this, but that’s what my hunch is.
If you can create a video of any of your constructions in Life, or put the constructions up in a format that I can load into a simulator at my end, I would be fascinated to take a look at what you’ve put together!
I can definitely see this intuition! But one of the biggest differences between our universe and Life is that Life’s rules aren’t reversible, which means entropy can go down universally. So I think that’s pretty good reason to believe that e.g. an ash-clearing machine is possible.
I performed the same experiment with glider guns and got the same result “stalagmite of ash” result.
I didn’t use that name for it, but I instantly recognized my result under that description <3
When I performed that experiment, I was relatively naive about physics and turing machines and so on, and sort of didn’t have the “more dakka” gut feeling that you can always try crazier things once you have granted that you’re doing math, and so infinities are as nothing to your hypothetical planning limits. Applying that level of effort to Conway’s Life… something that might be interesting would be to play with 2^N glider guns in parallel, with variations in their offsets, periodicities, and glider types, for progressively larger values of N? Somewhere in all the variety it might be possible to generate a “cleaning ray”?
If fully general cleaning rays are impossible, that would also be an interesting result! (Also, it is the result I expect.)
My current hunch is that a “cleaning ray with a program” (that is allowed to be fed some kind of setup information full of cheat codes about the details of the finite ash that it is aimed at) might be possible.
Then I would expect there to be a lurking result where there was some kind of Maxwell’s Demon style argument about how many bits of cheatcode are necessary to clean up how much random ash… and then you’re back to another result confirming the second law of thermodynamics, but now with greater generality about a more abstract physics? I haven’t done any of this, but that’s what my hunch is.
If you can create a video of any of your constructions in Life, or put the constructions up in a format that I can load into a simulator at my end, I would be fascinated to take a look at what you’ve put together!
I can definitely see this intuition! But one of the biggest differences between our universe and Life is that Life’s rules aren’t reversible, which means entropy can go down universally. So I think that’s pretty good reason to believe that e.g. an ash-clearing machine is possible.