Note that for a Life board what one means by “random” is not at all obvious. How likely are cells to start as alive? This percentage could drastically alter the behavior of the board.
There’s a more general question that you seem to be implicitly asking: Is there a life configuration which will have a reasonably high probability of of expanding across most random fields? My initial conjecture is something like “no, unless the initial probability of a cell in any given spot is very low”. The rough intuition here is that even if one has a functionally smart configuration in Life, it will not be able to see what is happening far away from it until it is too late. Essentially, the speed of observation and the speed of bad things happening to it occur at about the same speed.
If the board is big enough, I don’t know that it matters what the chance of any given cell starting alive or dead is.
Sight in Life
I’m not sure if this is possible, but I can imagine a Life Entity that generates and fires radar projectiles which also continuously generate their own projectiles firing back at the entity. (The entity has some kind of membrane that easily absorbs the returning projectiles.) If the radar particle collides with something, it is disrupted and stops sending particles back. The entity is able to observe events in the distance by measuring the lack of returning particles. (Returning particles might also have some kind of interactions with each other that provides additional information)
I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about Life, so I have no idea if this actually is workable. But it’s what first occurs to me.
If the board is big enough, I don’t know that it matters what the chance of any given cell starting alive or dead is.
What matters isn’t just what the local configuration looks like but how well it can expand. Expanding into empty space is easy. Expanding into densely populated space is much tougher.
Re the radar idea. Radar in some sense (and most real world senses for that matter) work because they give information much faster than the environment moves. in the case of real life radar, or vision, this is as fast as the laws of physics allow. Unfortunately, in Life, the equivalent speed of light is not a speed at which stable objects can self-propagate. Objects can only propagate in life at most c/2. Worse, some very simple configurations meet this speed. This means that if one runs into a bad configuration one will likely get that data the same time that the disruptive c/2 stuff is coming in. Configurations that can move themselves and leave trails will move much slower than c/2 and only send back messenger gliders every few moves. Finally, even if one did get data back, since most complicated configuration are only barely stable, it is unlikely one could get any information other than that something occurred at around a specific area that disrupted your configuration.
I disagree with your final point, that it is unlikely that it would be possible to get information other than “something occurred at around a specific area;” however I agree with your other points.
A detailed computer is likely to be very unstable. Even if it could collect lots of information about the environment reliably at a distance, it would not be able to retrieve or utilize that information quickly.
In a large enough board, however, we would expect to see a computer that was essentially isolated except for a few small stable patterns which it would be able to interact with via radar.
Presumably a sufficiently intelligent AI would be able to better configure the patterns of life, perhaps using some kind of protective membrane.
However the chance of creating a life board of such a size and with such a distribution that one would expect to see ONE such AI and not a thousand or more (which would likely have different goals and levels of intelligence) would mean that rather than expecting to see one type of complex computation take over the board, I might expect that in the limit (i.e. in a 3^^^3 board; after about 3^^^3! time steps) to see extended wars between the most intelligent AIs.
Unless it turns out that there is an unstoppable self-propagating “virus” in the game of life, which would be a somewhat depressing thing to learn!
There is another cellular automaton called the Cyclic Cellular Automaton (warning: Java applet). There, these viruses emerge naturally, without any effort. They are called daemons. When several of them meet, a pretty pattern emerges. I always use these to help visualize agents burning the cosmic commons with the speed of light,
Note that for a Life board what one means by “random” is not at all obvious. How likely are cells to start as alive? This percentage could drastically alter the behavior of the board.
There’s a more general question that you seem to be implicitly asking: Is there a life configuration which will have a reasonably high probability of of expanding across most random fields? My initial conjecture is something like “no, unless the initial probability of a cell in any given spot is very low”. The rough intuition here is that even if one has a functionally smart configuration in Life, it will not be able to see what is happening far away from it until it is too late. Essentially, the speed of observation and the speed of bad things happening to it occur at about the same speed.
If the board is big enough, I don’t know that it matters what the chance of any given cell starting alive or dead is.
I’m not sure if this is possible, but I can imagine a Life Entity that generates and fires radar projectiles which also continuously generate their own projectiles firing back at the entity. (The entity has some kind of membrane that easily absorbs the returning projectiles.) If the radar particle collides with something, it is disrupted and stops sending particles back. The entity is able to observe events in the distance by measuring the lack of returning particles. (Returning particles might also have some kind of interactions with each other that provides additional information)
I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about Life, so I have no idea if this actually is workable. But it’s what first occurs to me.
What matters isn’t just what the local configuration looks like but how well it can expand. Expanding into empty space is easy. Expanding into densely populated space is much tougher.
Re the radar idea. Radar in some sense (and most real world senses for that matter) work because they give information much faster than the environment moves. in the case of real life radar, or vision, this is as fast as the laws of physics allow. Unfortunately, in Life, the equivalent speed of light is not a speed at which stable objects can self-propagate. Objects can only propagate in life at most c/2. Worse, some very simple configurations meet this speed. This means that if one runs into a bad configuration one will likely get that data the same time that the disruptive c/2 stuff is coming in. Configurations that can move themselves and leave trails will move much slower than c/2 and only send back messenger gliders every few moves. Finally, even if one did get data back, since most complicated configuration are only barely stable, it is unlikely one could get any information other than that something occurred at around a specific area that disrupted your configuration.
I disagree with your final point, that it is unlikely that it would be possible to get information other than “something occurred at around a specific area;” however I agree with your other points.
A detailed computer is likely to be very unstable. Even if it could collect lots of information about the environment reliably at a distance, it would not be able to retrieve or utilize that information quickly.
In a large enough board, however, we would expect to see a computer that was essentially isolated except for a few small stable patterns which it would be able to interact with via radar.
Presumably a sufficiently intelligent AI would be able to better configure the patterns of life, perhaps using some kind of protective membrane.
However the chance of creating a life board of such a size and with such a distribution that one would expect to see ONE such AI and not a thousand or more (which would likely have different goals and levels of intelligence) would mean that rather than expecting to see one type of complex computation take over the board, I might expect that in the limit (i.e. in a 3^^^3 board; after about 3^^^3! time steps) to see extended wars between the most intelligent AIs.
Unless it turns out that there is an unstoppable self-propagating “virus” in the game of life, which would be a somewhat depressing thing to learn!
What happens when two copies of the virus meet?
There is another cellular automaton called the Cyclic Cellular Automaton (warning: Java applet). There, these viruses emerge naturally, without any effort. They are called daemons. When several of them meet, a pretty pattern emerges. I always use these to help visualize agents burning the cosmic commons with the speed of light,
They high five then continue on? I don’t really know enough about the game to say.