Life-Related Dreams

[drc]

I don't know if this is commonplace, but I had one just last night. Unfortunately I don't remember it that well, but here are the details:

I was apgsearching a rule, and the haul got uploaded, there were a couple still lifes, xs4, xs5, xs6, xs7, etc. And then, there was just an xs10288 at the very end. Not even an ov_s10288. Just an xs10288, and before that there were things like xs14, xs13, things you'd expect. I dunno, just struck me as odd.

[Kazyan]

I've had a few Life-related dreams in the past, and one of them did involve the results screen from apgsearch v0.x. Not as many as I should expect by now, though, given how Life has been one of my post persistent hobbies since early adolescence. It's a low-stakes hobby, and most of my memorable dreams these days are very emotionally charged, usually with fear--and there's nothing to really be afraid of about Life. There's not a lot I can do to massively screw something up for people. And so, fewer dreams.

[gmc_nxtman]

I once had a dream where my apgsearch found a c/17 spaceship, but I woke up right before I posted it to the forums.

[Kiran]

I once had a dream where my apgsearch found a c/17 spaceship, but I woke up right before I posted it to the forums.

Can't pass this up:
https://www.xkcd.com/269/

[praosylen]

I had one a while back where I was seeing a screenshot from apgsearch v4.something running on some sort of supercomputer, so there were several-trillion-soup hauls and one of them contained a loafer and a p17 spaceship (interesting coincidence).

[Saka]

I dreamed once that I rode a spaceship named "glider"

[calcyman]

@gmc_nxtman, @A for Awesome:

Can you remember anything at all about the p17 ship? Was it orthogonal or diagonal? Symmetric or asymmetric?

[gmc_nxtman]

@gmc_nxtman, @A for Awesome:

Can you remember anything at all about the p17 ship? Was it orthogonal or diagonal? Symmetric or asymmetric?

It was definitely orthogonal, and I'm not 100% sure but I think it was asymmetric.

[drc]

@gmc_nxtman, @A for Awesome:

Can you remember anything at all about the p17 ship? Was it orthogonal or diagonal? Symmetric or asymmetric?

If this leads to an actual discovery I'll actually quit life. Conway's game at least ^^

[Mr. Missed Her]

If this leads to an actual discovery I'll actually quit life. Conway's game at least ^^

Don't worry, probability's got you covered.

(Probably.)

[dvgrn]

It's a low-stakes hobby, and most of my memorable dreams these days are very emotionally charged, usually with fear--and there's nothing to really be afraid of about Life. There's not a lot I can do to massively screw something up for people.

Don't know about that. I'll explain more below.

I'm kind of your diametric opposite in the dream department -- for some reason, I almost never have scary dreams, but my dreams do frequently bore me awake: I call them "bureaucratic nightmares". Basically in the dream there's some important unfinished task, and I can never get it finished because other annoying little things keep going wrong that I have to fix first -- have to go pick someone up, but can't find car keys, and then end up at a meeting or a class that I've forgotten all about, so I don't have the meeting notes or the homework or whatever, and then I notice that I'm still wearing pyjamas and no shoes.

Luckily this kind of thing happens to me a lot in Real Life also -- once upon a time I really did end up at work with a pyjama shirt on under a sweater, for example, so had to keep wearing the sweater all day even though it was too hot.

Probably as a result of this, even in my dreams I'm pretty philosophical about it all, never get scared or upset or mad. Usually I just kind of sigh and go wandering off looking for whatever the most urgent missing piece is, until the next thing goes wrong and I have to try to solve that instead. But it sure is a relief to wake up and realize that my life isn't quite so out of control as _that_, after all!

Anyway, speaking of diametric opposites, I did have a scary Life-related dream, just a couple of days ago. In my dream I had gotten distracted while I was at work by a really cool table with something like blank Scrabble tiles floating an inch or so off the table in interesting CA-type patterns. The table was in a corner meeting room on the second floor with lots of windows all around -- and apparently Somebody Important was driving by and saw me wasting time at that table.

So my manager called me into a room and shut the door and gave me a small stack of plastic gift certificate cards -- apparently as a way of softening the blow while firing me. Losing a job because of a Life-type distraction was actually embarrassing and scary enough to get my heart going faster -- I don't remember any other dreams in the last several years that have done that...! Was even more relieved than usual when I woke up from that one.

[praosylen]

@gmc_nxtman, @A for Awesome:

Can you remember anything at all about the p17 ship? Was it orthogonal or diagonal? Symmetric or asymmetric?

I have no idea; all I saw was the apgcode, and I don't remember what it was other than that it started with xq17.

[gameoflifemaniac]

I had a dream that a p100 cordership gun was discovered... but in origami

[muzik]

I once had a dream where my apgsearch found a c/17 spaceship, but I woke up right before I posted it to the forums.

Ouch.



I've had many similar-ish dreams concerning different subjects.

[blah]

I think it's possible that A For Awesome actually never dreamt of a p17 spaceship, but his mind filled in the gap in his memory by seeing that gmc_nxtman did, and then he recalled it with absolute certainty. Human memory is _REALLY_ unreliable, especially of dreams.

Either way, I hope we find the p17 spaceship that totally exists.

[praosylen]

I think it's possible that A For Awesome actually never dreamt of a p17 spaceship, but his mind filled in the gap in his memory by seeing that gmc_nxtman did, and then he recalled it with absolute certainty. Human memory is _REALLY_ unreliable, especially of dreams.

Either way, I hope we find the p17 spaceship that totally exists.

I don't even remember whether it was p17 (I think so, but it's possible my mind was misleading me), but I know it was prime. It was also one of many results that the program output. I also distinctly remember thinking about the dream when I woke up, so it should be only REALLY (without the underscores) unreliable.

[shouldsee]

ijust woke up from a dream with wickstrectchers in a nontotalistic rule. There was some weird linear growing pattern: a moving-forward bag of chaos emitting similar infertile chaos backwards, not exactly a rake. Apgsrarch told me it is class z so I speed up the simulation, for one moment I can't really tell whether the gun is a emitter of getting emitted itself.

[Saka]

I solved a century-old mystery with life patterns. I forgot what it was but the machine I solved it with emitted a stream of spaceships as output and reads blocks as input. The nswer was something like 35248 something and I forgot.

[gmc_nxtman]

I just had a dream where I found a reaction that created a large p2 and p3 oscillator but then I thought "this is crazy... wait, maybe it's not real, yeah this is a dream" and then I woke up and the word "dream" sort of echoed through my mind until I looked at my alarm clock.

[dani]

Just an xs10288, and before that there were things like xs14, xs13, things you'd expect. I dunno, just struck me as odd.

This kind of foreshadowed apgsearch's new updates and huge wickstrecher still lifes, now that I think about it.

[KittyTac]

I had a dream about an open-world multiplayer GoL game where the goal is to eliminate your opponents using a variety of rules, some of them non-totalistic, one of them being Platoon. My replicators made me conquer everyone, then I woke up. Someone should make this.

[dani]

Someone should make this.

It would be extremely easy to win using B0/S8 or something related.
Even if rules with B0, B1e, B1c, and/or B2a were excluded, exploding rules would dominate. If exploding rules were excluded, replicating rules would dominate. Barring that, rules that are extremely stable would take over, or someone could just drop in an invincible wall puffer like this:

Code: Select all

x = 15, y = 7, rule = B2-ac3ai/S1c23q4-i5
b2o9b2o$o13bo$b2o9b2o$6bobo$b2obo2bo2bob2o$o5bobo5bo$b2o9b2o!

[KittyTac]

Someone should make this.

It would be extremely easy to win using B0/S8 or something related.
Even if rules with B0, B1e, B1c, and/or B2a were excluded, exploding rules would dominate. If exploding rules were excluded, replicating rules would dominate. Barring that, rules that are extremely stable would take over, or someone could just drop in an invincible wall puffer like this:

Code: Select all

x = 15, y = 7, rule = B2-ac3ai/S1c23q4-i5
b2o9b2o$o13bo$b2o9b2o$6bobo$b2obo2bo2bob2o$o5bobo5bo$b2o9b2o!

Cells from different players next to each other would instantly annihilate each other, so wall puffers would be only a temporary roadblock. Still, this could be interesting.

[toroidalet]

Cells from different players next to each other would instantly annihilate each other, so wall puffers would be only a temporary roadblock. Still, this could be interesting.

Of course, you have to take fairness or someone could use a rule like B2-a345678/S012345678 to instantly win by filling up the grid at the maximum possible speed and being barely affected by other cells.
Back on topic, I had a dream involving Life having a super-common orthogonal ship, I'm pretty sure the speed was c/5 and it wasn't the T but this was a while ago so I'm not sure. This stuff was actually implied because in the dream I was running a soup and it was producing tons of these small c/5s.

[gameoflifemaniac]

I had a dream that a p38 oscillator partial was discovered. It was weird: it worked using *WSS salvos! But I thought that it wasn't p38, but mod 38.