Can I skip Conway's Game of Life in ATBS?

[David40]

I just started learning python with the famous book ATBS and after coming across Conway's Game of Life, I realized, "damn, I do not care about this project lol".. Pretty much I'm too lazy to try to understand it with my one braincell, I'd rather focus on something else. Will I miss anything important? Should I just push myself to do it?

EDITed by calcyman to remove spam links

[MathAndCode]

How much something like this matters is subjective, but most of the people on this forum care about Conway's Game of Life a lot because that's what this forum is for, so they wouldn't be on it otherwise. I'm sure that the members of this forum will be willing to explain to you various features of Conway's Game of Life (I certainly am.), but for the purposes of understanding what the program is supposed to do, all you need to know is that it occurs on an infinite square array of pixels (called cells), a cell that is off turns on for the next frame if and only if exactly three of its eight neighbors are on, and a cell that is on turns off for the next generation if less than two of its eight neighbors are on or more than three of its eight neighbors are on.

[Dylan Chen]

is python your first programming language ?

have you seen the OCTA meta-pixel ?

if any answer is 'no', perhaps it is not neccessary to force yourself do things you don't like. spent time on the project you really interested in, that is the good way learning programming.



if you'd like to check some Game of Life demostration video, perhaps you'll start to like it.


have a nice day

[Hunting]

is python your first programming language ?

have you seen the OCTA meta-pixel ?

if any answer is 'no', perhaps it is not neccessary to force yourself do things you don't like. spent time on the project you really interested in, that is the good way learning programming.



if you'd like to check some Game of Life demostration video, perhaps you'll start to like it.


have a nice day

For some reason, many were fascinated by the OTCA metapixel, which I'm not. Once you get the idea, it's fairly trivial to build a metapixel with logic gates, or a Snake game, or a digital clock, all three were unbelievably overrated.

[dvgrn]

For some reason, many were fascinated by the OTCA metapixel, which I'm not. Once you get the idea, it's fairly trivial to build a metapixel with logic gates, or a Snake game, or a digital clock, all three were unbelievably overrated.

Snake game? Do you mean the Quest for Tetris project?

They may have been "trivial", but that definitely doesn't mean that any of them were easy to complete. I doubt that it's a common opinion that any of these were "unbelievably overrated" -- but then, that's not a particularly nice label to apply to anyone's CA project, of any size or difficulty level.

[pcallahan]

They may have been "trivial", but that definitely doesn't mean that any of them were easy to complete. I doubt that it's a common opinion that any of these were "unbelievably overrated" -- but then, that's not a particularly nice label to apply to anyone's CA project, of any size or difficulty level.

People are motivated by different things in Conway's Game of Life, and I agree there's no call to be dismissive of anyone's interests. As I think you wrote on another thread, some CGOL hobbyists are engineers, not mathematicians. If something obviously can be done, then it may be "trivial" to a mathematician to do it, but not everyone sees it that way.

On a sort of related note, I found it interesting to see Coxeter's statement in Regular Polytopes that "J. Hermes wasted ten years of his life on {65537}" That is, producing an explicit compass and straight-edge construction of a regular 65537-gon. To be honest, it feels like a waste to me too, but ultimately that's a judgment. He must have felt it was worth doing explicitly.

A digital clock in Life is no less interesting than a real digital clock at this point (we have enough clocks on phones, computers, microwave ovens, and everywhere else) but it's fun sometimes. I think some of the other large constructions are more interesting when they point the way to self-replication--which they accomplish in CGOL, but I wonder what it would take to get non-living self-replication going in the real world. Even that is not mathematically very interesting, because we can see it's doable.

[Macbi]

As I think you wrote on another thread, some CGOL hobbyists are engineers, not mathematicians. If something obviously can be done, then it may be "trivial" to a mathematician to do it, but not everyone sees it that way.

There are interesting CGoL problems for mathematicians too. One I've been thinking about recently is whether or not there exist finite population patterns which have a predecessor but which don't have a finite population predecessor.

[calcyman]

As I think you wrote on another thread, some CGOL hobbyists are engineers, not mathematicians. If something obviously can be done, then it may be "trivial" to a mathematician to do it, but not everyone sees it that way.

There are interesting CGoL problems for mathematicians too. One I've been thinking about recently is whether or not there exist finite population patterns which have a predecessor but which don't have a finite population predecessor.

These definitely exist in other rules (such as a single live cell in rule 90). I'd be very surprised if they exist in CGoL.