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sgravn
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09 Jul 2012, 12:51 am

When I was somebody's age, there was a screensaver that shipped with Red Hat or Gentoo or something, and I can't find it anymore, but it happens to be the perfect demonstration of "life" arising from random inputs.

At startup it would have just a grid of green 0s. Actually, it was a looping single line of 0s, and the 0s were Turing machine symbols. A "tape head" cursor would move around following instructions, but some of the symbols would change randomly. Eventually, all of a sudden, the cursor would start printing the same pattern over and over again until it ran into something that broke the run. These wormy little things would get more and more complicated, developing defense mechanisms and eating each other until you had a veritable zoo fighting with itself for space.

You would complete me by telling me what on earth it was and where I can get it.



questor
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09 Jul 2012, 1:59 am

Sorry, can't help you, but it does sound interesting. I've tried a number of different screen savers over the years. The one I've liked the best so far is the one that randomly cycles through the pix in your picture folder, including all of the sub folders in the pix folder. Any time I come across pix I like on the internet I save them, so now I have quite a collection. It's fun to come back to the computer and find these pix I like being played on the screen. I will usually sit for a minute or two to watch them before moving the curser to get back to what I had been doing on the computer. :D



Cornflake
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10 Jul 2012, 7:42 am

sgravn wrote:
Eventually, all of a sudden, the cursor would start printing the same pattern over and over again until it ran into something that broke the run. These wormy little things would get more and more complicated, developing defense mechanisms and eating each other until you had a veritable zoo fighting with itself for space.
That sounds like Conway's "Game of Life" implemented as a screensaver, and I think you're describing a "glider" crashing into something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Unfortunately I can't point you at the screensaver... :cry:

ETA: but I can point you at an amazing implementation of Life: http://golly.sourceforge.net/


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