CGOL patterns as NFTs

[Dylan Chen]

The NFT things nftkey.app has caused various dispute in our community (discord channel)
Currently it wouldn't hurt much to our community, but further precautions must be taken into consider.
how do we protect the authenticity of CGoL/CA patterns? (especially it's history)
what's our attitude towards money related things in the field of CA patterns.

1. could patreons be allowed?
2. would money rewards be accepted?
3. in future days, when discoveries cannot be made from single home based PC any more, how do we collaborative through shared mainframes?


Edit:

Are they claiming discovery?

Yes it is. pls check https://automatons.io/


they directly steal the work of Hartmut Holzwart without any permission.

Edit2:
could you come back to discord ?

[wwei47]

Are they claiming discovery? Also, note the erroneous things about 44P12.3.
EDIT:

Edit:

Are they claiming discovery?

Yes it is. pls check https://automatons.io/
<Image removed due to size>

they directly steal the work of Hartmut Holzwart without any permission.

Edit2:
could you come back to discord ?

It seems like they're giving credit there.
Edit 2: And no, I won't.

[hkoenig]

It's hard to get past the jargon, unstated assumptions, and poorly defined terms to figure out what exactly is supposed to be going on, but it looks a lot like digital tulip-mania.

Each BIO will also form part of a superorganism to interact together once all are minted.

I don't think they've thought this through, because you can't just go and stitch together a bunch of 17x17 tori and expect all the little pretty pictures to make one big pretty picture.

If these people think they somehow are going to "own" these patterns they've "minted", they are welcome to their delusions.

[wwei47]

I don't think they've thought this through, because you can't just go and stitch together a bunch of 17x17 tori and expect all the little pretty pictures to make one big pretty picture.

It's not even a torus! It's a bounded plane!

[mniemiec]

Just for grins, I looked at the ones that were for sale. Most of them aren't, but there are a few. The first one I saw that was has a price of "8 ETH $20.4k". I think anyone who is willing to drop $20K for a non-fungible digital token is welcome to his gold-plated pet rock; I certainly won't be participating.

Some of the patterns at least are actual known periodic life patterns, but most of them appear to be random bit doodles that may have some interesting meaning as visual images, but none as far as Life is concerned. Tying these things to Life appears to be a red herring, and I can't imagine it appealing to any actual Life enthusiasts.

Claiming ownership of (and then monetizing) information that is in the public domain leaves a bad taste in my mouth. E.g. On my own website, I do have a copyright notice (to prevent outright blanket cloning of the site by third parties without permission or attribution), but I make it very clear that this applies to the actual text commentary and formatting only (i.e. content that I personally created by hand) - the actual mathematical data (patterns, statistics, etc.) are in the public domain, and were largely discovered by a large number of people.

If these people think they somehow are going to "own" these patterns they've "minted", they are welcome to their delusions.

I don't think they believe they own the patterns; they just own the NFTs signed with those patterns. They've just created a bunch of new and expensive digital land, and opened up the land rush, hoping to capitalize on the fools who think it's worth something. Taking something worthless, declaring it "collectible" and "exclusive", and thus in short supply, while convincing people that there's a demand for it, is a time-honored capitalist tradition.

While they don't own Mickey Mouse, *YOU* can be the only person on the planet that has a pet rock with a Mickey Mouse painted on the front - for as low as $20K.

[hkoenig]

It's not even a torus!

I admit I didn't look too hard, but thought I saw patterns appearing around the edges. Or maybe that's the filler Glider animation only.

So they show various Spaceships, but don't actually support them?

...has concluded that it's much less bother to just get a regular job and self-fund whatever they want to accomplish.

Also, I've found that "you get what you pay for", and it's worth paying for hosting, DNS, email, domain names, certificates, etc. It gets me more control, and the providers tend to be less likely to magically disappear one day and to be less intrusive (e.g., Google). I do charge for my apps, like theLifeCodex iPad app, but that's mostly to filter out people who like to download everything and then whine and complain about it not meeting their definitions of perfect.

Taking something worthless, declaring it "collectible" and "exclusive", and thus in short supply, while convincing people that there's a demand for it, is a time-honored capitalist tradition.

A minor correction-- this is not "capitalist", it's just "grifting" or a "con" updated to modern times.

It seems that this is an application of the three rules given to W.C.Fields by his grandfather (just before the sprung the trap)--

1) You can't cheat an honest man.
2) Never give a sucker an even break.
3) Never smarten up a chump.

[simsim314]

I've seen this NFT minting site. And it's a good start - as it's the simplest mechanics for CGOL NFT patterns.

But I'm thinking how we can combine soup search - with NFT thus encourage people use NFT for more than just minting existing patterns.

I came up with a design that have much of the NFT mechanics but can work to encourage CGOL pattern discovery.

1. Each user is assigned a public key. This is given from the blockchain. Each user can "buy" a range of numbers to mine. This could be very cheap something like 100 trillion for 1 cent. Just to avoid cheating - and encourage people to mine from 0 to N in order.

The mining pattern is 16x16 CGOL pattern based on Sha256(Public Key + index) for index in valid range (bought by the user).

2. The mining consist of assigning each pattern reached to stability or periodicity (including puffers/rakes/guns), to the user. This is done locally, there is no need to upload all your mined SLs and oscillators into the blockchain. But this can be used later on as "proof of source" - i.e. when you find something useful you can upload it to the blockchain, using proof of source i.e. you as miner can add index and location of the pattern mined. Anyone can verify this pattern was mined by you. Thus each "component" in our CGOL universe has a mining source in form of public key + index + (x, y) in the stabilized soup.

3. The next step is to upload composed patterns (minting a new component) made from either a. components mined by you b. components bought from someone c. other composed components you own. Obviously with detailed "proof of source" and "proof of ownership" - i.e. providing the exact source of each component and validating you're the current rightful owner of all the used component, in the minted pattern.

4. All this will be obviously traded on a market. So you can buy specific people's specific components. Imagine buying some glider gun from Gosper. Or buying some gliders from Conway etc. I hope this kinda starts to make sense.

The main idea is that our community is making discoveries. So many new discoveries can also be minted. Glider synths, Hershel conduits, designed spaceships can all be minted this way. So discovering and publishing new patterns as NFTs can also have economical incentive. Think that every new discovery can also be bought from the creator, and publishing will always come with NFT minting of the discovery and "sale" of it.

5. As the components could be pretty large (think of minting a caterpillar). We need to find a blockchain with pretty efficient design and a very cheap gas. So either Polygon/FTM if the developer wants to use solidity, and Solana to make it even cheaper - but with obvious extra development costs, and some less user friendly interface.

6. Obviously this can't work without community approval and engagement. NFT has only subjective meaning, it has to be a hype so to say.

[calcyman]

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.

[AGreason]

Rather than attempting to increase the number of communities obsessed with meaningless grift, I would suggest instead not doing this.

[hkoenig]

The whole point of collecting type hobbies is to validate the "greater fool principle". That there is some other fool willing to buy what you've collected, and at a higher price. This sounds like a pyramid scheme where the chumps are panicked into participating, lest they "lose out."

At least with tulip bulbs, the buyer got something that could be grown into a real plant. We barely enforce copyright infringement anymore, (If we did, Youtube wouldn't exist.) So why should a non-believer respect the supposed "uniqueness" associated with something digital?

And where does all that energy to "mine" these things come from? (I used to try to do my searches in the winter, as at least the waste heat had some use.)

6. Obviously this can't work without community approval and engagement. NFT has only subjective meaning, it has to be a hype so to say.

You've answered your own questions here.

[dvgrn]

I was thinking for a moment that a kind of NFT that I might support would be an "anti-NFT" -- a new one would be minted only when somebody actually discovers something new. It would be granted to the discoverer for free, with ownership not transferable to anybody else (and therefore not sellable).

Then I realized that we already have all of that. We just call it "attribution", and skip all the pointless fiddling around with blockchain.

[dani]

I know that you have good intentions to get more people interested in CA. The subject of those particular Life NFT's has actually come up in our Discord before, with most people agreeing it's not worth their time. It's clear the owner of the site has just heard of Conway's Game of Life, looked through LifeWiki or some similar surface-level pattern collection, added some basic shaders, and tried to make a quick buck out of our community's work.

There's a reason the NFTkey website doesn't tell you about Golly, they need to make it feel as if they're doing something special when all they needed to use were image libraries and *maybe* a custom simulator. There's a huge bonus to just running a pattern in Golly too - you can move it alongside other patterns, and interact them together in ways you can't do with a GIF. You can even share them with people.

The main problem is that Life goes against everything NFT's stand for. Patterns should be free and accessible to everybody to use, which is very preferable to having to purchase patterns from someone. And everybody would know what the pattern looks like, anyway, so someone could just copy it into Golly and share the RLE, devaluing it.

After that, you're just left with "proof of ownership" - which we already have in the form of a couple characters on a LifeWiki page or pattern collection saying who discovered the pattern. I don't think anybody in this community has ever considered that worth any amount of money.

Even if these new NFT's were different they would still be rotten to the core, and put a stain on our community. The only people who buy most NFT's either a) don't know enough about computers to realize it's just a GIF, or b) people who think they can find someone like person a to scam into profit. Also, the type of community that tends to form around stuff like that tends to want to monetize everything, in a hobby where everything is free save for a few cash prizes offered out of generosity, so that worries me.

I think the idea of incentivizing people to do searches has some merit, though - remember CAcoin? - just we really shouldn't go anywhere near NFT's.

[pcallahan]

Just my two cents (for 200 trillion mineable numbers): I was not a big fan of the CGoL cryptocurrency idea, but I like this even less.

What happened to LifeCoin? One thing I see as a redeeming quality is that if people are going to burn energy to create artificial scarcity, it would be nice if they were computing something meaningful in the process. If that ever got going, it would be at least a little bit interesting.

Though I can think of other things I might like more. Remember in the early 2000s there were those crowdsourcing apps like SETI@Home that would run programs on home computers? One I found interesting was for protein folding. I don't know the state of the art in predicting protein conformation, but that would be a use for compute cycles with scientific interest and social benefit. (Granted, it is much harder for a software engineer to code up.)

While I'm sure there are legitimate uses of blockchain, cryptocurrency always makes me think of Douglas Adam's "leaf-based currency." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309207 ... eks-ago-to

"So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances.”

[calcyman]

(Note: I tried to move the related discussion from the basic questions thread here, but due to chronology the posts have been prepended to the thread instead of appended.)

What happened to LifeCoin? One thing I see as a redeeming quality is that if people are going to burn energy to create artificial scarcity, it would be nice if they were computing something meaningful in the process. If that ever got going, it would be at least a little bit interesting.

Largely what happened was that the 'CAcoin' thread inspired the creation of Catagolue, and the automatic user attribution system acted as enough of an incentive for people to leave their computers running apgsearch continually, thereby removing the need to attach a proof-of-work cryptocurrency to the whole thing. Somewhat like what Dave mentioned a few posts above.

I don't know the state of the art in predicting protein conformation

I believe that it's DeepMind's AlphaFold 2, by a considerable margin: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

Also, the type of community that tends to form around stuff like that tends to want to monetize everything, in a hobby where everything is free save for a few cash prizes offered out of generosity, so that worries me.

Agreed. That's half of my concern about this idea being applied to GoL; the other half is that it could lead to heated disputes about who discovered a pattern.

The only people who buy most NFT's either a) don't know enough about computers to realize it's just a GIF, or b) people who think they can find someone like person a to scam into profit.

That might be slightly unfair. There do exist legitimate uses of NFTs (for example, it makes it easier for artists to sell their work). I just feel that it would be unfair to everyone who's contributed to CGoL for free for the last 50 years if suddenly this community was taken over by grifters who wanted to extract money out of other peoples' effort.

To make my position on NFTs absolutely clear:

• Minting NFTs out of your own creations == absolutely fine!
• Minting NFTs out of someone else's creations == just not cricket.

All of the existing CA-related NFT projects that I've seen (NFTkey, Automatons, and those MNCA NFTs) are in the latter camp, unfortunately.

[simsim314]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

I definitely think we should discuss this. Should we? The main reason is to promote the research - monetize it, and thus bringing wider audience from other communities, and being able to earn good buck from doing CGOL research as main occupation. This would promote the field a lot. Just like any artist that makes money from minting NFTs.

number of communities obsessed with meaningless grift

I think you're completely missing the point of NFT. This is an opportunity for creators of different kind to monetize their effort. Creating CGOL patterns is hard work, that people are doing for free. Many artists are moving toward this model, this is good monetization strategy. From singers to basketball players all mint their work and art as NFTs. I see no reason this community will not do the same. If you think CGOL patterns are interesting and have value - this proves it's not a "meaningless grift", but a meaningful creation. Wouldn't you think the creator should be rewarded for his work?

"greater fool principle". That there is some other fool willing to buy what you've collected

I would suggest to get more familiar with NFT. How is it different from painting for example? Or signed books by author? Art collectibles have intrinsic historical and esthetic value. Virtual creations have exactly the same value as hand painted ones. It's not easier to create CGOL patterns than to draw on canvas. Or would you say Mona-Lisa is also bought by greater fools? Maybe all the museums and all the art is made of fools, then maybe all our culture is such? I would say buying Mona Lisa is better investment than buying gold.

This sounds like a pyramid scheme where the chumps are panicked into participating, lest they "lose out."

Although your description is simply wrong, unless any art in history is bought by greatest fools, but the design could create a pyramid scheme in some other ways. Would you consider buying NFT glider gun from Gosper if he would mint only single copy of it? Do you find it very different to buying Mona Lisa from Leonardo?

So why should a non-believer respect the supposed "uniqueness" associated with something digital?

This is very simple to answer. Would you pay the same money if someone will draw the exact copy of the same painting? This is not about copy rights but about ownership. if you can own paper money, which are completely useless pieces of paper, you can own also virtual money. The money you have and own in your bank account is completely virtual. Bitcoin chain is way more reliable than your bank, and it does the exact same thing. NFTs is just the next step, allowing you to own not a single number but another property like cgol pattern. If you can own 100$ printed by US government, you can own Gosper's glider gun minted by Gosper. This is all virtual ownership for a while now. The US government doesn't even prints money, they just add several trillions to their bank account. They mint dollars.

It would be granted to the discoverer for free, with ownership not transferable to anybody else (and therefore not sellable).

Well the ownership is the point of minting. How would such model be able to get monetization? All the point of blockchain is that pieces of art are traded on the market - thus have an estimated market value, just like currency or physical art. If Gosper would mint a single gun with his discovery wouldn't you want to own it? Can you imagine some "physicals" representation of CGOL pattern that you would like to buy? Say a 3d sculpture of some pattern evolved in time?

and tried to make a quick buck out of our community's work.

I wouldn't call it buck from the community work. He was selling beehives and blinkers too. But I do think this simplistic model, especially without getting anyone interested in the value of such patterns appreciating the NFT as simply valueless. Like selling ice to Eskimo. You need to get community somehow interested in it. For example Katy Perry who already has a fan base - launches an NFT drop. You need both the intersubjective value, and a community who supports it.

There's a huge bonus to just running a pattern in Golly too

BTW golly integration can come with "logical designer" - imagine that in order to mint P43 you need to have 4 snarks. So you need to mint snarks, i.e. you want to have a script that mints snarks - then you want to place those snarks as logical components and mint a higher component.

This is what I'm saying this can combine several of our community efforts into one big toolbox, that allows monetization. Imagine every component in you pattern is not only pixels but has a "metadata" about the larger logical function of it.

which we already have in the form of a couple characters on a LifeWiki page or pattern collection saying who discovered the pattern.

You are confusing discovery attribution and ownership. Think Leonardo Da-Vinci is the discoverer of Mona-Lisa but the owner is Louvre Museum. It's not the same person. Someone payed a good buck to Leonardo to own the Mona Lisa. We still know it's his painting and attribute it to him, but the "physical representation" of this painting is another story. You can also google and see the painting you don't need to go to the museum to see it, and you will not get more educated or gain any information from seeing it in the museum.

a) don't know enough about computers to realize it's just a GIF,

Just like 100$ in your bank account - is just a number stored in their hard drive.

b) people who think they can find someone like person a to scam into profit.

I don't think NFT is a scam. If I draw a painting and you like it - and you pay me money to own it, it's not a scam. Even if only two of us like this painting and no one else is.

anyway, so someone could just copy it into Golly and share the RLE, devaluing it.

Do you think googling Mona Lisa seeing all the virtual pictures, devaluating the physical copy of it? Or telling everyone how much money you have in your bank account devaluating the value you have? The money in your bank account is completely virtual. And the money is just useless pieces of paper.

The main problem is that Life goes against everything NFT's stand for. Patterns should be free and accessible to everybody to use,

I think you are completely missing the point of NFT. This is another way to monetize your art work without any copyrights. This is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The more people use the pattern the more value the original NFT attributed to the discovery would have.

You are basically confusing ownership, contribution and usage. To make it clear: Katy Perry can today release a song. Mint it on blockchain and as more people listening to it for free the more value she can gain from the minted NFT that she could sell. This is both allowing the artist to monetize his work, the audience to enjoy the work for free. This would still forever remain her song, even if she sold the minted NFT of it to several people. They don't gain any copyrights, actually NFTs gain more value from forbidding any copyrights enforcing MIT license on it.

remember CAcoin? - just we really shouldn't go anywhere near NFT's.

The point of CA coin was to convince people to use CGOL soup search. NFT does the exact same thing for exact same reason, and much more - like encouraging discovery of glider synthesis, and discovery of new composite patterns that people find interesting (new guns, oscillators, larger patterns etc.)

CA coin is also not feasible today - the market moved from proof of work to proof of stake and other means to reach consensus and validation.

but I like this even less

Agreed. That's half of my concern about this idea being applied to GoL; the other half is that it could lead to heated disputes about who discovered a pattern.

Would you agree that CGOL pattern discovery is artistic work? Pretty hard work I would say. Obviously we do it for free and for fun, but I don't see a lot of logic to assume people should do stuff for free. I think we in many ways fail to monetize our work and our art. Monetization could bring some undesirable people to the community, but it could also hype it bringing many bright minds to it as well.

About who discovered the pattern: anyone can mint whatever he wants. The market i.e. the community decides if this is worth anything, each individual can decide it to himself. This is the beauty of free market - no one is obliged to any value of anything. BTW I don't think only the discoverer can mint his work, but I think if you publish a discovery and you say "those 10 NFTs are representing my monetization of the discovery". Then if you would like to mint again the same discovery, you can. And maybe someone will pay you for the second mint too, but the first will have much more value. Obviously this kind of stuff should be possible to validate and report scams - if we design everything correctly.

Minting NFTs out of your own creations == absolutely fine!
Minting NFTs out of someone else's creations == just not cricket.

Anyone can mint whatever they want. The value on the market will settle such disputes. I guess those CGOL patterns on nftkey have very very little value if at all. Once again we can as a community see value in some nfts and promote them and devaluate the other nfts. As a community we create value to patterns all the time - for example by likes, views, downloads, posting the patterns in LifeWiki and voting for them in Pattern Of The Year competition. I would guess the discoverer can mint his pattern twice (in meaningful manner), when he first posts it, and when he has won some place in the POTY.

The problem is not that we can't evaluate pattern values, the problem is that we don't have any monetization system whatsoever. NFTs add extra complexity to evaluation of them as they have both the pattern, the minter and the minting time. But this is a minor addition that can be settled in a free market.

I would say you as an art expert - you may say that this or that NFT is complete garbage as it was minted by someone who is not the creator. People could agree or disagree with this opinion, but it has its merit. I guess that artistic value is based on some amount of experts opinion and people who are willing to invest money into the art based on those opinions. I'm not entirely sure how this market works.

[pcallahan]

You are confusing discovery attribution and ownership. Think Leonardo Da-Vinci is the discoverer of Mona-Lisa but the owner is Louvre Museum. It's not the same person. Someone payed a good buck to Leonardo to own the Mona Lisa.

I agree that this is an important distinction and the point about attribution is not really a rebuttal.

I'm still very skeptical that NFTs will provide much of an incentive for anything in this community. The incentive for the most important discoveries remains, I think, a matter of personal curiosity rather than attribution. E.g., when I was looking for stable reflectors, I was less motivated by being "first" than by the thrill of actually seeing something like that work. (And in fact, I only lucked out that Buckingham publicized his Herschel toolkit before trying to complete a reflector on his own.) I'm not sure how much the culture has changed. There are more people involved, but it still seems to have a similar motivation.

[wwei47]

If you think CGOL patterns are interesting and have value - this proves it's not a "meaningless grift", but a meaningful creation. Wouldn't you think the creator should be rewarded for his work?

I mostly do artificial synthesis in Life. The joy of getting a component to work is what rewards me. :D
EDIT: Typo fix

[simsim314]

The joy of getting a component to work is what rewards me.

I know. See my next comment to pcallahan. My goal is to allow people like you make this their profession, so that you will not need to do anything else for living, and this activity that brings you joy, will bring you also the bread on the table. Just like chess players who can invest all their time in chess, because someone made it possible to make money out of chess competitions.

[simsim314]

when I was looking for stable reflectors, I was less motivated by being "first" than by the thrill of actually seeing something like that work.

You need to distinguish between different kinds of people and different motivations provided by/to them. As an artist your motivation is to create art, this has always been and will always be - the main obstacle in your case, is the real world that demands paying your bills while you want to create art and explore the wonders of the universe. As the community, its motivation is to grow and support the art form, and the artists in it - obviously encouraging more people to create in the field and get interested by the art. As some rich people who might invest a lot of money into buying the art it might be the will to own the specific art pieces that became symbols or have historical/cultural/sentimental significance, appreciating the different artists, or just given a stable art market - a safer way to store value.

We didn't solved our first challenge yet - we don't know how to monetize our art, thus anyone who works on CGOL creations, doing it out of his own pocket, out of his free time, and only for fun. Attracting only very modest attention, as we speak some alien language that only we understand and takes a lot of effort to learn (unlike money which is universal language, and NFT is the translator). While the work we are creating and the value is both artistic and mathematic and appreciated by millions of people. We fail like many other before us to monetize our work.

And now we have a modern decentralized unique opportunity to fix it. But it can't be done without realizing why we need it as a community. I can write everything, create the CGOL NFT market, post some of my discoveries there, invest in the PR campaign and it might work, it will still be selling alien art form. The presence of community who understand what it's, how it works, why it works and why it's needed - will attract much more attention much quicker and much more cheaper and reliably. The community is essential here.

NFT is on a new hype today - I see how it might worry people, especially half of the community don't get what it's. People think that if someone looks at your NFT he is somehow devaluating it, it's not differs from someone looking at your bank account is stealing money from you. Your bank is storing digits and transactions of the digits, it can store digital assets the same way as it's stored digits. There is no difference - it's all 0s and 1s. If you can transfer "virtual dollars" you can transfer "virtual art", as long as it's signed and stored properly, and made in reliable way to prevent fraud. The only question remains is the realization that it needed to the community, and a good format to monetize our effort. The technicalities for example how you make sure you buy the correct creation minted at the right time by the right person - are all solved out already. I would guess that if Gosper would release his first gun as NFT, you would like to buy this specific gun today. If Gosper would release another million guns later on, you would still prefer to buy the original minted gun that was the discovery, yet you will see some value in guns minted by Gosper too. Maybe someone might see a value in Gosper glider guns minted by you as well - but maybe not, or much less.

[mniemiec]

To make my position on NFTs absolutely clear:

• Minting NFTs out of your own creations == absolutely fine!
• Minting NFTs out of someone else's creations == just not cricket.

All of the existing CA-related NFT projects that I've seen (NFTkey, Automatons, and those MNCA NFTs) are in the latter camp, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, the definition of your own creation can be fuzzy. If person A creates a fantastic new pattern, and person B reduces the stator by one cell, who owns the result? It's a bit similar to copyright on derivative works. Does A own it? Does B? Do each own a percentage, and if so, how much? It's not well defined.

I definitely think we should discuss this. Should we? The main reason is to promote the research - monetize it, and thus bringing wider audience from other communities, and being able to earn good buck from doing CGOL research as main occupation. This would promote the field a lot. Just like any artist that makes money from minting NFTs.

Unfortunately, the restricted and highly artificial size of the patterns, and the visual nature of NFTs, would encourage finding small patterns that are visually pretty, rather than ones that are functionally useful. This would be somewhat akin to recruiting rocket scientists at a beauty pageant.

I think you're completely missing the point of NFT. This is an opportunity for creators of different kind to monetize their effort. Creating CGOL patterns is hard work, that people are doing for free. Many artists are moving toward this model, this is good monetization strategy. From singers to basketball players all mint their work and art as NFTs. I see no reason this community will not do the same. If you think CGOL patterns are interesting and have value - this proves it's not a "meaningless grift", but a meaningful creation. Wouldn't you think the creator should be rewarded for his work?

This also begs the question of who IS the creator of a life pattern? Is it a person who did a lot of work to actually create the pattern in the first place? Not anymore. It now becomes the person who owns enough iron to find that previously-discovered pattern lurking in a soup. Yes, there are occasionally new discoveries that are first discovered in soups, but those tend to be the exception, rather than the rule.

I would suggest to get more familiar with NFT. How is it different from painting for example? Or signed books by author? Art collectibles have intrinsic historical and esthetic value. Virtual creations have exactly the same value as hand painted ones. It's not easier to create CGOL patterns than to draw on canvas. Or would you say Mona-Lisa is also bought by greater fools? Maybe all the museums and all the art is made of fools, then maybe all our culture is such? I would say buying Mona Lisa is better investment than buying gold.

Paintings and other forms of art are valuable because they exhibit unique qualities put into them by their well-known and well-respected artists. The original Mona Lisa is worth a lot more than hand-painted duplicates that look almost identical, and digital copies are a dime a dozen. Mined patterns, on the other hand, exhibit no unique genius of their own. Two people could mine slightly different versions of the glider gun (e.g. stator variants). Neither would be intrinsically more valuable than the other.

Although your description is simply wrong, unless any art in history is bought by greatest fools, but the design could create a pyramid scheme in some other ways. Would you consider buying NFT glider gun from Gosper if he would mint only single copy of it? Do you find it very different to buying Mona Lisa from Leonardo?

Again, note that Gosper and Leonardo created those works by hand; it would be very different if Gosper had found the glider gun, and Smith found a soup containing one, and Smith sold the corresponding NFT for a lot of money.

This is very simple to answer. Would you pay the same money if someone will draw the exact copy of the same painting? This is not about copy rights but about ownership. if you can own paper money, which are completely useless pieces of paper, you can own also virtual money. The money you have and own in your bank account is completely virtual. Bitcoin chain is way more reliable than your bank, and it does the exact same thing. NFTs is just the next step, allowing you to own not a single number but another property like cgol pattern. If you can own 100$ printed by US government, you can own Gosper's glider gun minted by Gosper. This is all virtual ownership for a while now. The US government doesn't even prints money, they just add several trillions to their bank account. They mint dollars.

Money and Bitcoin are very different - they are by definition fungible. If money worked like NFTs, instead of spending money based on the printed value on the bill, it would be traded the way collectors sell rare coins and bills (or other collectibles).

Well the ownership is the point of minting. How would such model be able to get monetization? All the point of blockchain is that pieces of art are traded on the market - thus have an estimated market value, just like currency or physical art. If Gosper would mint a single gun with his discovery wouldn't you want to own it? Can you imagine some "physicals" representation of CGOL pattern that you would like to buy? Say a 3d sculpture of some pattern evolved in time?

If I wanted a pretty sculpture of a glider gun, I'd much rather just 3d sculpt one from the public domain pattern, rather than spend $100K for the rights to have the only one.

You are confusing discovery attribution and ownership. Think Leonardo Da-Vinci is the discoverer of Mona-Lisa but the owner is Louvre Museum. It's not the same person. Someone payed a good buck to Leonardo to own the Mona Lisa. We still know it's his painting and attribute it to him, but the "physical representation" of this painting is another story. You can also google and see the painting you don't need to go to the museum to see it, and you will not get more educated or gain any information from seeing it in the museum.

This is the exact point. Leonardo created the Mona Lisa, the ownership has been legally transferred down through the centuries, and now rests with the Louvre. This would be very different from Gosper discovering the glider gun, and Smith finding one in a soup and monetizing it. Smith never pays any money to Gosper.

I don't think NFT is a scam. If I draw a painting and you like it - and you pay me money to own it, it's not a scam. Even if only two of us like this painting and no one else is.

It's not a scam, exactly, because everyone involved knows exactly what they're getting. However, it can be deceptive, in the way that collectors of any rare commodities may think that what they're investing in has some intrinsic value, but it really doesn't. There have been many collectible fads over the years that generated a lot of revenue for clever people playing the games, until the bubble burst and people lost interest (e.g. pet rocks, beanie babies, etc.) At least tulips had some use beyond being collectibles.

Whenever large sums of money are involved in a collectibles market, that market is sure to attract some unscrupulous individuals whose sole interest is to manipulate the market to squeeze money out of it, at the expense of gullible genuine collectors.

A few days ago, I watched a video about fraud and deception in the collectible video game market. It started out talking about a mint sealed NES Super Mario Brothers cartridge that sold for $30K, and the very same cartridge was later resold several times within the next year or so for $100K, $300K, $1M, and I think subsequently $2M. It turned out that the CEO of the auction house that sold many of these game is also on the board of the company that provides professional valuations of their worth - a clear conflict of interest (and several decades ago, was forced to pay a multi-million-dollar judgment for a similar scheme involving collectible coins).

I later watched a reaction video by a collector, who is actually a video game hobbyist, but who also monetizes his hobby by buying and flipping rare video games, watch the above video. By the end, he was upset because he realized that he had just effectively lost several hundred thousand dollars of investments due to artificially inflated games.

I think you are completely missing the point of NFT. This is another way to monetize your art work without any copyrights. This is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The more people use the pattern the more value the original NFT attributed to the discovery would have.

Again, this is confusing art (deliberate creation of thought-producing patterns) with randomly generated patterns. Yes, there are some people who will pay $100K for ballons of paint sprayed randomly on a canvas (which is the real-world equivalent of mining bit patterns from soups). I certainly won't be one of them.

You are basically confusing ownership, contribution and usage. To make it clear: Katy Perry can today release a song. Mint it on blockchain and as more people listening to it for free the more value she can gain from the minted NFT that she could sell. This is both allowing the artist to monetize his work, the audience to enjoy the work for free. This would still forever remain her song, even if she sold the minted NFT of it to several people. They don't gain any copyrights, actually NFTs gain more value from forbidding any copyrights enforcing MIT license on it.

Again, Katy Perry takes a lot of work to write, practice, and record a song. She didn't mine it with a random computer search.

The point of CA coin was to convince people to use CGOL soup search. NFT does the exact same thing for exact same reason, and much more - like encouraging discovery of glider synthesis, and discovery of new composite patterns that people find interesting (new guns, oscillators, larger patterns etc.)

Most interesting CGOL discoveries won't fit in a 16x16 box. In particular, glider syntheses, engineered spaceships, etc. won't.

Would you agree that CGOL pattern discovery is artistic work? Pretty hard work I would say. Obviously we do it for free and for fun, but I don't see a lot of logic to assume people should do stuff for free. I think we in many ways fail to monetize our work and our art. Monetization could bring some undesirable people to the community, but it could also hype it bringing many bright minds to it as well.

Again, Gosper discovered the glider gun, but Smith can monetize it just because HE first found it in a soup? That's not how "artistic works" work.

[pcallahan]

Unfortunately, the restricted and highly artificial size of the patterns, and the visual nature of NFTs, would encourage finding small patterns that are visually pretty, rather than ones that are functionally useful.

This is a really good point that puts me solidly on the "No" side. I'm skeptical there would be a market for NFTs that provides a benefit to the CGoL community as simsim314 suggests. But suppose there was. It would simply not be priced in a way that correlates even slightly with what the community values. E.g., think of the old pattern called "Cheshire Cat." It's just a block predecessor that somebody made to look vaguely like a cat. But because it had a catchy name connected to Alice in Wonderland, it found its way into lists of canonical patterns.

Or for another example, xkcd's tribute to John Conway. I appreciate this a lot more. It's clever and fitting. But it's not significant. Anyone who knows can see the trick. Tweak a stick figure enough different ways and you can find a glider predecessor that moves up and away from it. But to the naive observer, it's magic.

If our community was little more outward looking, we'd be focused on education, and really trying to convey what parts of CGoL are interesting. But we don't have to be. That's fine. It's a tough sell. On the other hand, if we were really trying to get a larger audience to pay money for our work, we'd be optimizing for their standards, and it would be the opposite of the kind of educational outreach I'd like to see.

I realize you could read the above as the words of a purist snob. I don't mean that. Everyone should get whatever joy they want out of CGoL or anything else. I just think that this attempt to monetize it would be a distraction from the best work being done here rather than a help.

[MathAndCode]

I definitely think we should discuss this. Should we? The main reason is to promote the research - monetize it, and thus bringing wider audience from other communities, and being able to earn good buck from doing CGOL research as main occupation. This would promote the field a lot. Just like any artist that makes money from minting NFTs.

I think you're completely missing the point of NFT. This is an opportunity for creators of different kind to monetize their effort. Creating CGOL patterns is hard work, that people are doing for free. Many artists are moving toward this model, this is good monetization strategy. From singers to basketball players all mint their work and art as NFTs. I see no reason this community will not do the same. If you think CGOL patterns are interesting and have value - this proves it's not a "meaningless grift", but a meaningful creation. Wouldn't you think the creator should be rewarded for his work?

I don't think that those points are valid because (at least currently), the actual creators of the patterns don't get any money.

[simsim314]

I don't think that those points are valid because (at least currently), the actual creators of the patterns don't get any money.

This is exactly the reality CGOL NFTs can change.

[simsim314]

Unfortunately, the restricted and highly artificial size of the patterns, and the visual nature of NFTs, would encourage finding small patterns that are visually pretty, rather than ones that are functionally useful. This would be somewhat akin to recruiting rocket scientists at a beauty pageant.

There are several answers to this concern.

1. The nft could be even a signature of a file. The file can be minted in permanent decentralized disk storage (for example arweave decentralized permanent storage space - meant to function as Alexandria library of knowledge and provide permanent storage space for future generations). Only the signature of the file will be stored in the blockchain, while the file will provide detailed rle + miners/minter tree hierarchy as proof of ownership that can be validated using both the permanent file storage and the blockchain. Arwaeave have also some NFT support.

2, This problem occurs with only big patterns - they usually don't composite even bigger patterns. So this is unique problem that needs a specific solution. Minting something small and functional like some G->X converters or middle range size pattern can be stored on the blockchain pretty easily.

3. As of the picture it can either be integrated with golly or have several "views" just like you view large patterns in golly. The stored file can have an rle format, and javascript viewer just like you post patterns here in the forum. There is nothing about NFTs that forces them to work like gifs i.e. rle pattern with viewer is the same as gif for all means and purposes. It's just a UI of the market. I don't want to use existing market UI, but to write one specifically for CGOL.

4. For NFTs value is what important than the visual aspect. Most of the more expensive NFTs are pretty ugly actually. It's all about the monetary value. If you post a 100MB file in Arweave and format it as NFT, if people pay to own those 100MB pattern because it's a new spaceship or whatever, then it works. People can learn to use new tools - as long as those tools eventually provide them profit. Also most of the patterns are fun to watch and can be posted as video - for the "front face".

5, In my design the buyer is performing proof of ownership to the patterns. Maybe it's possible to provide some amount of proof of ownership directly by the blockchain. For example if you say after 1000 generation there is glider there and there the blockchain can validate it and register it in your name.

This also begs the question of who IS the creator of a life pattern? Is it a person who did a lot of work to actually create the pattern in the first place? Not anymore. It now becomes the person who owns enough iron to find that previously-discovered pattern lurking in a soup. Yes, there are occasionally new discoveries that are first discovered in soups, but those tend to be the exception, rather than the rule.

I didn't get this. The minting process in my design is for new true discoveries of composite patterns. I mean new new glider guns, new stable circuit, new glider synthesis. Very rarely you will discover some unique pattern in the soup search itself, it's meant mainly to provide components for higher level designs. But it also allows to find rarer patterns too. You can think of it a card decks - the rarer the pattern the more reason you have to mint it. The market will decide what is more profitable to just invest in iron and large miners for rare patterns, or to the contrary creating esthetic interesting composite patterns. Whatever people see more value in. Anyway it there would be economical incentive to mine new or rare CGOL patterns, thus increasing the probability of discovering new ones, I have no real problem with that. Anyway the answer to most such question is - let the market decide. If it has value people will buy it.

Again, note that Gosper and Leonardo created those works by hand; it would be very different if Gosper had found the glider gun, and Smith found a soup containing one, and Smith sold the corresponding NFT for a lot of money.

Once again I will let the market decide this. My design provide opportunity for both. Composites by hands as well as those found in natural soups. If someone payed for a lot of electricity and iron to mine unique and rare CGOL patterns, I think he deserves some reward.

Paintings and other forms of art are valuable because they exhibit unique qualities put into them by their well-known and well-respected artists. The original Mona Lisa is worth a lot more than hand-painted duplicates that look almost identical, and digital copies are a dime a dozen. Mined patterns, on the other hand, exhibit no unique genius of their own. Two people could mine slightly different versions of the glider gun (e.g. stator variants). Neither would be intrinsically more valuable than the other.

In my design every minted pattern is inherently attributed to the public key of the miner. Thus if I mined a glider gun, you can't automatically mine the exact same glider gun in the same way. You will need to find other soup that would be connected to your wallet/public key. If the glider gun is rarely occurs in soups then finding the same rare pattern is still unique. The system is also designed to not allow you to have duplication of this finding. Thus it's not only uniquely attributed to the miner, but also can be minted only once - by design.

If two people found the same rare pattern from two different soups - then great we will have two NFTs attributed to two different people in our collection, and the pattern is a little bit less rare. Let the market decide how the value changes.

Money and Bitcoin are very different - they are by definition fungible. If money worked like NFTs, instead of spending money based on the printed value on the bill, it would be traded the way collectors sell rare coins and bills (or other collectibles).

I never said money and NFT are the same. They have the same validity, and their ownership is based the same way. If you can own 100 virtual bucks in your bank account, and it doesn't bothers you that it's just a line in the database you can replicate in your computer, you can own a virtual art piece on the blockchain and it shouldn't bother you you can replicate it. Imagine a bank that also sells NFTs if this helps you to understand my point. If you trust the numbers banks tell you to represent value, why wouldn't you trust pictures the bank shows you to represent value? There is nothing inherently different between the two concerning the ownership rights or value storage. They have totally different mechanics of course, but it's all 0s and 1s stored in a special vault that tracks value.

If I wanted a pretty sculpture of a glider gun, I'd much rather just 3d sculpt one from the public domain pattern, rather than spend $100K for the rights to have the only one.

Would you buy a 3d design of such pattern? I mean someone did some work there to convert the ugly 2d pattern into 3d sculpt. So although you could do the work yourself, wouldn't you rather buy an existing 3d model?

playing the games, until the bubble burst and people lost interest (e.g. pet rocks, beanie babies, etc.) At least tulips had some use beyond being collectibles.

It can happen to any investment. This is why I think CGOL is unique, our patterns have value regardless of their market prices. And the mechanics of CGOL is mathematical, so we don't depend on some CEO who will create a new art. It's mathematical.

Whenever large sums of money are involved in a collectibles market, that market is sure to attract some unscrupulous individuals whose sole interest is to manipulate the market to squeeze money out of it, at the expense of gullible genuine collectors.

I'm not afraid too much of this scenario. If CGOL patterns will involve large money, I think I've reached the purpose of this posts. As I said the patterns and their discovery have intrinsic value and people are doing it for free and for fun. This is a good indication crooks will not take over the market, as we have a good established expertise in the field that can evaluate patterns long time before. And if someone is stupid to throw his money on fake NFT patterns that worth nothing, then how is it differs from any other NFT market? Frauds happen everywhere. How is it to blame the community or the attempt to earn a honest buck for true CGOL discovery?

Most interesting CGOL discoveries won't fit in a 16x16 box. In particular, glider syntheses, engineered spaceships, etc. won't.

Let me explain the mechanics once more.

1. Everyone can mine the patterns. If you have a 16x16 initial pattern that stabilized and there is a block there, a glider or a pufferfish it's all mined by you. Imagine the resulted pattern made of "stuff" that you actually have. Maybe like deck of cards.

2. You can mint i.e. upload to the blockchain every such pattern. You can mint blocks, gliders, pufferfishes - whatever comes from your soups.

3. You can combine together the mined/minted patterns that you own, to mint another composite patterns made from those small ones. So everything that is constructed from gliders, will a) first will need to be mined to have those glider in your wallet (or bought) and b) constructed together to generate a new level pattern - for example you mine 52 gliders and then combine them together to make a snark. Then you can mint snarks, and sell them to people who want to use them for their patterns. If Mike Playle will mint some snarks and sell them and you will use them for your designs, then your designs would contain both - your patterns, and snarks minted by Mike. Thus adding some value to them. Mike could mint his snarks from glider bought from Conway if he would be alive and could mint gliders. Each component is made of lower components reaching down to basic SL components attributed to different miners attached to someone's wallet.

Again, Gosper discovered the glider gun, but Smith can monetize it just because HE first found it in a soup? That's not how "artistic works" work.

Conway found the glider - good luck with monetizing it. If this pattern was found in soup attached to his wallet, and this is a rare pattern who cares who found it first? I mean let the market decide this question. You can always fail monetize anything if no one wants to buy your pattern.

[simsim314]

E.g., think of the old pattern called "Cheshire Cat." It's just a block predecessor that somebody made to look vaguely like a cat... Or for another example, xkcd's tribute to John Conway. I appreciate this a lot more. It's clever and fitting. But it's not significant. Anyone who knows can see the trick. Tweak a stick figure enough different ways and you can find a glider predecessor that moves up and away from it. But to the naive observer, it's magic.

Those specific examples don't comply in any way to the format I'm suggesting. I would also claim that you would be right if the culture wouldn't start and be based in our community but somewhere outside it. But if our community starts to be involved and we will be the first ones to decide value and maintain the NFT site project, there is much more chances it would be for benefit of the research. We would be able to explain why some NFT have values while other don't.

It's still possible someone will take bunch of blocks, and create some form of pixel art using those blocks. This would be valid pattern. I don't see what stops people from doing it today in the forum too - but if you would say the NFT project will bring many such "pseudo artists" that many people would like, I mean why do you care so much about it? I'm sure people will start shooting gliders at those pieces of art made from blocks or create puffers/printers that generate those using CGOL circuitry. As I can see it - because everything is made from SLs by design, it has many opportunities to both our community and other "fake artists". As far as I can tell, this will bring a nice collaboration with other communities instead.

Your post clearly indicates you didn't understand the mechanics I'm suggesting. I don't mind if you against the suggestion, but please try first to grasp the idea - before throwing it out. There could be interesting benefits - even something like "glider synth of stable version of Cheshire Cat, can be both amusing and resonating with cat lovers and with our community as well. There is no real contradiction there, and the design is made to minimize such "hand drawn" shitty patterns. As to mint you have to use components from stabilized soups. We can enforce minting format too. As I see it, it should always be stable made of stable patterns, gliders shoot from far, or special rare patterns that can be placed everywhere like glider guns. Anyway this is sort of discussion I would like to have.

We also have some patterns like 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and no one complained it's not true CGOL discovery. Actually it was the first usage of CGOL generic computer, and earned 19th place in POTY 2019. There is plenty of space on the crossroad between CGOL and art, and excluding those hand drawn stuff - as long as we enforce some basic minting format we can keep it well inside CGOL research.