[HN Gopher] Particle Life ___________________________________________________________________ Particle Life Author : hyperific Score : 146 points Date : 2023-12-28 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | billytetrud wrote: | This is fascinating. It's like a more complex game of life than | John connoway's. It's crazy that little creatures seem to form at | such small scales easily with these parameters. It's almost like | the parameters of our real universe intentionally made it | difficult to form life, rather than easy as some people seem to | think. | at_a_remove wrote: | They are less creatures than molecules. Now, mind you, as some | complex sets of rules approach steady state I can pretend they | are far-flung stellar empires with colors ascribed to each type | of system of government (and have). | | What is fooling you is the motion. This is sustained because | the system has no conservation principles built in. You can | make A-B pairs where B is attracted to A, A is repelled by B, | and off they go, zoom. Were the meta-rules devised such that | conservation of energy or momentum and such were baked in to | whatever system you devised, you would see less exciting | structures which would more resemble a late-stage pentamino | explosion in the Game of Life. | | With a sufficiently large processor, I would like to see this | in three dimensions and more options for force, such as | dropping off as the inverse of r or r-cubed or even r * log(r), | or some "repulsive at a distance, attractive at very close | quarters" particles. I have a feeling that such a system would | grind to a halt even with clever optimizations. | billytetrud wrote: | Ah that's interesting, I can see how that would result in a | lot more dynamic behavior. | dustingetz wrote: | need analog computer for that :) | squigz wrote: | There's no reason to believe life is particularly rare in the | universe either, though. | billytetrud wrote: | There are, in fact, reasons to believe that. Nothing | definitive of course. But the fact that we haven't been | absorbed by a von neumann swarm or something like it places | strict limits on the prevalence of life and/or what stages | that life can achieve. One would either have to belive that | intelligent life is vastly less likely than non-intelligent | life, or that life itself is quite rare, or that life simply | hasn't been around for much longer than life on earth. | squigz wrote: | I don't see not being eaten by a swarm of machines as | evidence of anything - but it is interesting to me that | you'd qualify all this with "or what stages that life can | achieve". So simple life could be extraordinarily | commonplace, and considering the context of this post... | billytetrud wrote: | It is a fact that we haven't been eaten by a swarm of | anything. Facts are evidence. If you don't understand | that, I don't think we'll be having a productive or fun | converstion. Sound more like you're interested in making | innane snarky comments to fuel your own ego. Good luck | with that. | squigz wrote: | Would you like to actually address the point I made about | simple life? | billytetrud wrote: | If you made a point about that, it was not clear to me. | Perhaps you were implying that simple life could be very | common even if intelligent life isn't. While yes, that is | a possibility, that says nothing of its probability. Were | that the circumstance, it leaves the question open as to | why simple life would be common but intelligent life not | common. | UncleOxidant wrote: | > One would either have to belive that intelligent life is | vastly less likely than non-intelligent life | | That seems like a valid belief. Getting to a technological | stage such that a species would be detectable over the vast | distances of space could indeed be quite rare. You have to | also consider the temporal aspect: intelligent, | technologically advanced species may have evolved several | times but gone extinct before we could notice them. Do | other technically advanced species exist in the universe? | Probably, but it could be that at any given time there | might only be about 1 in any given galaxy and the distances | between galaxies are great enough that we'd never likely be | able to make contact. (and ~1 per galaxy would still mean | that there would be a whole lot of intelligent species out | there - it's just that it would be extremely difficult to | make contact with any of them) | billytetrud wrote: | > That seems like a valid belief. | | Its not at all clear in general. It _might_ be true. But | it also might not. It seems quite reasonable to believe | that life inevitably evolves into intelligent life if | given enough time. Why some life would and some life | wouldn 't isn't at all clear. | | > advanced species may have evolved several times but | gone extinct before we could notice them. | | All the potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, for sure. | But it would almost definitely have to be species that | never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar | systems" phase. | | > at any given time there's only about 1 | | This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1. If it got | to earth at any time in the last billion years, we might | have a pretty high chance of discovering it if it existed | on earth for any significant legnth of time. | UncleOxidant wrote: | > But it would almost definitely have to be species that | never got to the "expand rapidly into other solar | systems" phase. | | It's certainly not a given that our species will ever do | that or that we'll last long enough to do that. | | > This doesn't preclude us knowing about that 1. | | Let's say we're the 1 currently in the milky way galaxy. | There could be another in the closest galaxy the Canis | Major Dwarf Galaxy which is 25,000 light years away. But | being able to detect a signal from 25,000 light years | away... well, that's the problem. And what if they're | just getting to the point where they could transmit a | signal now? So maybe in 25,000 years we'd notice | _something_... maybe? (if we 're still around) As far as | physically traveling 25,000 ly, well we know that even | trying to go 1 ly is going to be super difficult | technically. Similar problems even if there's an | intelligent species on the other side of our own galaxy | since it's 52K ly across. | aacid wrote: | I honestly believe that high intelligence while short term | is extremely advantageous, long term it is self- | destructive. | | I like to imagine there are countless planets with perfect | ecosystems of living organisms where no single species | dominates whole planet. | billytetrud wrote: | I'm curious what makes you think that. That is, of | course, one of the general solutions put forth to the | fermi paradox. Ie either the species develops species | killing weapons (like nukes) or individuals gain | massively destructive weapons. But I find these things | unlikely. Even exploding all of our existing nukes in the | most devastating locations would not destroy humanity or | the earth. We'd bounce back - tho if such an event is | inevitable, perhaps we would ride an endless wax and wane | between devastating destruction events every 1000 years. | pixl97 wrote: | There is no such thing as a perfect ecosystem because we | live in an imperfect universe, this is if you look at any | significant timescale. Eventually you're going to get hit | by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst, or some mega volcano | is going to pop and cause world wide levels of | destruction. And generally we see some reestablishment | species is going to dominate for some time. | geraldwhen wrote: | There is no evidence that space travel is practical or | sustainable. The only viable spaceship known to man is | Earth, and we don't steer it. | | Maybe there are lots of earth-like planets with intelligent | beings, but travel is impossible and communication is | useless given the time delay. | billytetrud wrote: | Saying there is "no evidence" is factually absurd. There | are a whole host of possibilities for practical long | distance space travel. At very least for small light- | weight robots. And it even seems possible that we can | viably transport our entire solarsystem: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU . No evidence | indeed... only if you lack imagination. | nox100 wrote: | It's not hard to believe that we could make self | replicating drones in the next 100 years that go from | system to system, make a few more, and continue. We've | already sent drones out of our solar system. They don't | have to go fast. They'd still visit every system in the | known universe in a "relatively" small amount of time. | (relative to the age of the known universe). | dekhn wrote: | I think it's reasonable to say that we could probably | build a fleet of ships containing tardigrades in their | dried-out tun state (which is biologically inert, up to | tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and extremely | resilient to radiation and vacuum), launch them with | enough mass to reach a nearby (up to 10 LY at 0.001c?) | solar system with a planet that has water, and deliver | the payload to the water, such that the tardigrades would | revert to their normal living state. | | It would cost a lot of money. It would take a very long | time (hundreds of thousands of years). Nobody alive today | would see the results. There are any number of systematic | and non-systematic failures that could occur. building | things that work autonomously for 100Kyears is | nontrivial. Even if you succeeded- say, 100Kyears from | now, one out of a thousand of your samples crash-lands | onto a remote planet and revives- congratulations, you've | maybe just contaminated an otherwise unknown ecosystem. | | The story gets more interesting if earth has fusion, | stable government and research funding, then you could | make humans into tuns that can travel for 10K years, and | have advanced propulsion (.01-.1c), pre-deliver full | infrastructure... | SkyBelow wrote: | There are a number of possibilities, which depends upon | what methods of interaction we are looking at. | | For example, with direct contact, we can estimate a | probability of life along side how possible space travel | is. Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all and so | there is plenty of life, but it is mostly stuck to its | solar systems and maybe a few neighboring stars. Overall, | given that we can send and receive signals much easier than | we can send and receive space crafts, I think this isn't as | useful a metric. | | The better one is that we don't see signals from other life | elsewhere, but this still has to be measured by how likely | life elsewhere would be able to see our signals. | | Lastly, there is the matter of what it means to be rare. | Say only 2 or 3 planets in a given galaxy end up developing | intelligent life, is that rare? Given the number of | galaxies in the visible universe, that is hundreds of | billions if not trillions of planets with intelligent life. | Yet with only 2 or 3 in a galaxy, it would be easy for us | to not see any signs because maybe we are the only ones in | our galaxy or our galactic neighbors are on the other side | of the milky way and we have no technology to communicate, | nor will we for the near future. Hundreds of billions of | intelligent species can be considered both rare and not | rare given the sorts of scales we are talking about. | | Also other edge cases, like maybe intelligent life is | common enough but it tends to rarely progress past a | certain point of development due to wiping itself out. | Personally, every explanation I've heard or can think of | has some sort of unpleasantness to it, much like the quote | that says either we are alone or we aren't alone, and both | ideas are scary in their own ways. | hsnewman wrote: | This shows how life is emergent from simple rules. | downboots wrote: | how does it show it? what is meant by life? are rules necessary | or just transitions? what enables rules at all? | hyperific wrote: | Physical and chemical properties of organic molecules give | rise to emergent life-like structures/patterns. Molecules | interacting via hydrogen bonding, solubility, hydrophobicity | and hydrophilicity - repulsion and attraction - can produce | protomembranes under the right conditions. | | In this demonstration, particles with certain rules can | interact in such a way that self-organizing structures | emerge. | matt-attack wrote: | A general question by those that support ideas like | Intelligent Design seem to focus on the notion of order from | randomness. Specifically the natural intuition is that the | vast amount of order associated with life could never arise | on its own from just randomness. It's encouraging to be able | to so quickly demonstrate that in fact order can emerge from | chaos. Even if the organelles or molecules or whatever you | might consider them in these simulations don't map | specifically to organelles or molecules or cells in our | world, the general concept is important to understand. | downboots wrote: | where do the rules come from? Is it randomness all the way | down? how come they run at all? how can a lifeform in a | dynamic mess of jiggling things have a claim to | understanding? | smusamashah wrote: | None of these simulated systems show replication evolving out | of random rules though. | block_dagger wrote: | Life, uh, finds its particles. | FpUser wrote: | Really liked it | theophrastus wrote: | Well done: 3d is an option! Always wondered what emergent | properties result from simple rules worlds when the | dimensionality goes from 2d to 3d. | jasonjmcghee wrote: | This is a much more complete implementation, but I took a crack | at this a while ago using compute shaders in Godot 4, if that's | interesting to folks! | | https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders | beders wrote: | It is amazing how easily self-sustaining structures emerge from | such simple rules. Mesmerizing. | Buttons840 wrote: | Is there any "sustaining" in the simulation? Is death a | possibility? If not, then there is no "sustaining". | spacecadet wrote: | Super cool! Earlier this year I created a zero-player simulation | using pygame and several AI coding assitants to see how capable | they might be. In the end I had to clean up alot, but Im happy | with how it turned out. | | https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft | bloopernova wrote: | offtopic: I got a new PC for xmas, and hadn't really stress | tested it to make sure the fan management curve was correct. | Running the linked site's demos made the fans work and they're | really responsive. Cool stuff! | dang wrote: | Related: | | _Particle Life Emerges from Simplicity_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156592 - Dec 2022 (1 | comment) | | _Particle Life Simulation_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680845 - Nov 2022 (1 | comment) | | _Particle Life_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21875720 | - Dec 2019 (7 comments) | airesearcher wrote: | This is so great!!! Nice work! | pbowyer wrote: | This is the most interesting one I generated: | https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-life/particle_life.html... | | It eventually settles down to one large and unstable blob and | another stable. Neither move so that's it. But before that it did | what I had expected to see with objects meeting and merging | deadbabe wrote: | I'm not really understanding what the "life" part of this is. | Buttons840 wrote: | Indeed. If we described this as a "neat circular patterns | simulator" would anything be lost? | | Is there reproduction? Is there evolution? Is there death? It | appears not. Those are essential to life. | emmanueloga_ wrote: | I suspect it is called life because some of the observed | patterns looks a lil bit like something you would see while | peering at a petri dish on a microscope (if you squint? :-). | Perhaps it is implied that with the right rules you would be | able to generate "the real thing". | superb-owl wrote: | I'd love to see this on a toroidal surface | justinl33 wrote: | a Mobius strip, even | sockaddr wrote: | Fascinating. This reminds me of nanopond | chuckadams wrote: | Looking at the 3d js version right now. This might be my most | favorite thing since the original Conway's life or maybe the old | Primordial Life screen saver from the 90's. Have you considered | adding shader support? I'd love to see a slowed-down more | "blobby" version running full-screen. Probably turn my mac into a | space heater too, but right now that's a bonus ;) | emmanueloga_ wrote: | What are the philosophical implications of these life models? Is | it implied that life as we know it may also have a simple set of | rules like this that generated it? Or is it just a game? (as in | Conway's GoL). | | Found some info here, seems like these are open questions [1]. | | -- | | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life#Philosophy ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-28 23:00 UTC)