In the last post, I complained about a bit about losing my edge - that weird drive to think about interesting stuff, and code stuff, and so on. Thankfully, it turned out to be a passing phase - the old me returned on Saturday, and life was suddenly a lot better...
About the title of this post - it's inspired by John Conway's incredible Game of Life. Here's the story...
While chilling out after a long day of writing assignments, I decided to use Firefox's cool StumbleUpon extension to find me something interesting to read. I clicked Stumble! and ended up here. This piqued my interest, because Hrishikesh(Kolhatkar, not Thite) had asked me to join him in writing an implementation of the Game, and since I'd always wanted to do this, I had agreed with a pretty fair amount of enthusiasm.
If you've clicked on the link, you can see the little rules at the bottom. They looked extremely simple, and going on to this page convinced me that it was a pretty trivial programming task. Unable to resist, I coded it up, and got it working in less than half an hour - and even that was because of a dumb bug I'd somehow introduced earlier. In fact, it would make a pretty good Div 1 300, or perhaps a Div 2 850, if there've ever been any of those...
Hrishikesh was pretty surprised when he found out - he's offered to rustle up a GUI, so I'll leave that to him for the time being. Perhaps I'll post a code skeleton up at Code Monkeys. It's really pretty simple - nothing fancy at all algorithmically, and that's precisely where the fun begins.
You see, by just following a few really simple rules, and picking an initial pattern, you can make the Game generate nice evolving systems of incredible complexity, considering how little you put in. In fact, the system is so damn fantastic because it's a Universal Turing Machine - which basically means that it can achieve the same level of computation as the machine you're reading this blog on right now...In fancy terms, it can compute any algorithmically computable function...
Life is actually a kind of cellular automaton, which are pretty cool things that I've read about in various places, but never in any real detail. This has piqued my interest, though, so I'll probably follow it up. The last place I remember reading about it was Artifical Life by Danny Hillis. I've been trying to get hold of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science for a while now...
And now to bed, for about five hours of sleep and a boring day tomorrow. Of course, there is the sponsored TC SRM in the evening, and Verisign India is gonna come into the chat room before the match, so it might be fun after all. Sadly I'm now in div 1, so no chance of winning any money, unless some kind of miracle occurs...
And now I lay me down to sleep...on second thought, forget it - why do I bother with these classical allusions anyway?
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