Talk:2293: RIP John Conway

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 21:42, 13 April 2020 by Hdjensofjfnen (talk | contribs)
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This is really very impressive. The design of the stick figure to allow it to release a glider that ascends upwards (the "soul" rising to "heaven" or whatever) with the body decaying - that's a hard thing to get right using just the Game of Life rules. 172.69.68.175 17:49, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Although Randall is clever, the Game of Life has been studied for so long that I'm sure this is a well-known animation. Barmar (talk) 18:29, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
I played with the game a bunch in the past, but I've only done a bit of research after this appeared. I don't immediately find any previous report of this starting arrangement
This is unlikely, as the Game of Life has an uncountable number of patterns of this size, some of which are still being discovered. The pattern above is 7 cells wide by 9 cells tall - the number of distinct patterns that can be drawn in that box nears 2 --> 60 --> 1 (2^60). It's most likely that patterns such as this one are commonplace, and Randall just fiddled around until he reached one that he desired. The pattern itself, however, has likely never been discovered before. (As a fun postscript, a notable 8-cell wide, 9-cell tall pattern oscillating at period 16, just slightly larger than the one above, was discovered in February 2020.)Hdjensofjfnen (talk) 21:31, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

was there a placeholder comic posted before the gif went live?

Looks like this is second animated comic in xkcd, besides 1116(though 1190 could be possibly counted together) 172.69.190.16 19:34, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Uh, 1331: Frequency and 1264: Slideshow immediately come to mind, and then I remember about 961: Eternal Flame. There's a lot more than two. Volleo6144 (talk) 19:43, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
Category:Comics with animation; just added it. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

The explanation says that the simulation is run on an infinite grid, but even when the grid is calculated out beyond the border of the viewable area, bounding errors & boundary formations can occur. I've never seen any implementation that actually produces an infinite, nor even practically infinite grid. (In fact, wasn't there a Minecraft mod that runs until it lags out the engine?) Can anybody point me to a truly infinite grid implementation? Conway's definitely was not infinite, he even commented at length about the boundary formations that show up at the grid edges (which are among the most subjectively beautiful, incidentally). I think the explanation needs correction?