There are no known structures in conway’s game of life that are robust. Even eaters, which are used to soak up excess gliders, only work when struck from specific directions.
If you had a life board which was extremely sparsely populated, it’s possible that a clever agent could send out salvos of gliders and other spaceships in all directions, in configurations that would stop incoming projectiles, inform it about the location of debris, and gradually remove that debris so that it would be safe to expand.
At a 50% density, the agent would need to start with a fairly large safe space around it, otherwise it would be overwhelmed. I can’t imagine even the best sensing/manipulating technology in life is capable of picking its way through even mostly static garbage at any more than a glacial pace.
Basically you’d have to send out a probe, wait for the echo, or lack of echo, and from that, recalculate the probabilities of all the different configurations of still lifes and oscillators and spaceships and puffers and so on that the probe could’ve hit, and how those configurations would’ve been altered or destroyed or (in most cases) expanded due to collision with your probe. And then work out another probe to send, and repeat the process, until eventually you had a good enough estimate of what you were dealing with that you could send probes calculated to get rid of it, and all the additional garbage you generated in the process of probing it.
It is unknown whether robust structures can exist in life, even if incredibly intelligent, incredibly large, and incredibly slow, but I would speculate that they can.
However, it’s also possible that there are far simpler robust expanding patterns, in which case, larger slower structures such as intelligent agents would be hopelessly overwhelmed.
The physics of GoL determine the technology available for an intelligent life form in the universe, and the limit of that technology may not be sufficient to ensure the eternal survival of that lifeform. But if that is the case in the GoL universe, the same might not be true in our universe.
There are no known structures in conway’s game of life that are robust. Even eaters, which are used to soak up excess gliders, only work when struck from specific directions.
If you had a life board which was extremely sparsely populated, it’s possible that a clever agent could send out salvos of gliders and other spaceships in all directions, in configurations that would stop incoming projectiles, inform it about the location of debris, and gradually remove that debris so that it would be safe to expand.
At a 50% density, the agent would need to start with a fairly large safe space around it, otherwise it would be overwhelmed. I can’t imagine even the best sensing/manipulating technology in life is capable of picking its way through even mostly static garbage at any more than a glacial pace.
Basically you’d have to send out a probe, wait for the echo, or lack of echo, and from that, recalculate the probabilities of all the different configurations of still lifes and oscillators and spaceships and puffers and so on that the probe could’ve hit, and how those configurations would’ve been altered or destroyed or (in most cases) expanded due to collision with your probe. And then work out another probe to send, and repeat the process, until eventually you had a good enough estimate of what you were dealing with that you could send probes calculated to get rid of it, and all the additional garbage you generated in the process of probing it.
It is unknown whether robust structures can exist in life, even if incredibly intelligent, incredibly large, and incredibly slow, but I would speculate that they can.
However, it’s also possible that there are far simpler robust expanding patterns, in which case, larger slower structures such as intelligent agents would be hopelessly overwhelmed.
Great post.
The physics of GoL determine the technology available for an intelligent life form in the universe, and the limit of that technology may not be sufficient to ensure the eternal survival of that lifeform. But if that is the case in the GoL universe, the same might not be true in our universe.