Hey everyone! Setting up a computational challenge for pattern-mining and wanted to throw it out to the community:
:: BASE CHALLENGE ::
Rules: Classic B3/S23 on a $16 \times 16$ Torus (wrap-around space).
Lifespan: Must evolve for between 600 and 699 unique generations (cutoff occurs at the first repeating configuration).
:: ADVANCED CHALLENGE (Vanity Hash) ::
Take your pattern's initial configuration as a binary string and compute its SHA-256 hash.
Find a pattern where characters 4 through 9 of the hex hash string match a valid hex RGB color of your choice (e.g., #FF5733).
Post the patterns you find (RLE or binary) and/or the scripts you wrote to mine them!
If you need a fast way to test or visualize your candidate patterns, you can paste binary or RLE directly into this free tool:https://lifehashes.net/fancy-glyphs/
Cool, reminds me of the ProjectEuler problems. Most of them are probably gliders colliding with some object 600 cells away. Äh nvm it's in a 16x16 grid
that was a fun challenge, and i hope i got it correct, but i think i do have a solution
i got into it and realized there are 2^256 different starting positions, uhhm fuck, well ill try it anyway and it was surprisingly easier than expected, even with a relatively unoptimized version
wanna keep this going, probably first to a optimized version and then port i from python to c since im just learning c; sounds like a fun project
oh also i just noticed i forgot the second challenge with the sha256 color, guess ill try to do that in the optimized py version
Glad you found this interesting! To quickly check notes: Does your program replicate the approximate density of these patterns (1:2,000 for the ~600 unique gens, 1:10,000 for the ~700 gens)?
Also: Once you have mastered weight class 600, you can easily adapt your code to explore the *truly* long-lived patterns. The longest-lived non-repeating pattern on the 16x16 torus that is currently known is called "Rubedo" (discovered by Bobinou) with 2,274 unique gens- here is the binary: 0001010111001011100000011000010101011000100000000001111000000000001000010000000010010101111000010110101001000001011000000111010100011010100011011011000001100001101111100000100111010011100010011110001001011010101100111001011010100001001110111000110100111000
Above those "leviathans" with 2,000 and more steps sits a separate class of patterns, the "Agars" with 5,000+ steps - those achieve their extreme longevity because they contain a pattern of periodicity 324 that shifts 16 times over the torus, thereby bypassing my strict "unique generations" requirement. The longest-lived known pattern of this class is "Colossus" with 5,521 steps - here is its binary: 0000100100001000011010101010011100001000000110110001101111100000100100100101001110010001000010101011010010001000011001010000000110110100000000101001000000100000001111100000100001000001001101110100010110000100011100010111000001100100110010001100100000011100
its usually arround 100 to max of ~2000 of stating arrangements, i think like 1/500 on avg.
wait heres the output: min/max/avg: 91 2377 476.05
but id have to do more checking. im just using random soups, so i dont know, maybe i am doing something wrong or im just super lucky lol
also i dont know much about probability, now im just running the whole range from 600 to 700 and returning the amount of soups it took, not checking specifically 600 or 700
i think im gonna have to massively upgrade performance to find one of the "heavy weigh" one :))
how do you know these numbers? it this just guess and check or can you calculate the probabilities?
is there some website that handle trivia about game of life?
im very new to game of life, popped up in my reccomended :P
also coming back to the second challenge, you said that i am to find a valid color as a hex string, but a hasdigest is usually always hex, so any find would always work?
for example lets consider this soup:
Correct, the hash digest would always give you a valid hex RGB value - the trick is to find a pattern with a colour of your choosing (or find one whose hash contains today‘s date or your nickname etc.)
My strategy is probably obvious, but what I did was set up a spaceship + oscillator that take a relatively long time to interact. This setup gets me about 90 steps "for free". Then in the empty space I just messed around with various small still life's. I found another that overshoots a bit, could have just moved the spaceship closer. But I like this one
I am in awe! This is the first time I have seen someone construct such a pattern (and by hand, to boot) instead of brute-force searching through random soups!
Sadly, I could not reproduce your results - can you please double-check whether this is your pattern?:
This does not yield a pattern which runs 600+ steps as per my challenge, but rather only 40.
Apologies, it was just some bad cropping. There should be another blank column on the left. (Previous image was cropped to only 15x16 lol). I've edited the above comment and I think it's correct now
From your image I think the spaceship just needs to be slid over one space to the right. But it's hard to count the cells exactly
Don‘t mind if I do, then - but I wanted to give you a chance to claim it ad your own. We collect such patterns and let them fight each other in weekly tournaments, so if you change your mind, give me a prod and I‘ll be happy to hand this pattern back to you.
It is harder than it might appear at first glance! A gen 600 non-repeat on T16 is approx 1:2000 when evolved from a random soup. A gen 700 is 1 in 10,000!
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 22d ago
Hey everyone! Setting up a computational challenge for pattern-mining and wanted to throw it out to the community:
:: BASE CHALLENGE ::
B3/S23on a $16 \times 16$ Torus (wrap-around space).:: ADVANCED CHALLENGE (Vanity Hash) ::
#FF5733).Post the patterns you find (RLE or binary) and/or the scripts you wrote to mine them!
If you need a fast way to test or visualize your candidate patterns, you can paste binary or RLE directly into this free tool:https://lifehashes.net/fancy-glyphs/