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All 23-Bit Still Lifes Are Glider Constructible (https://mvr.github.io)

125 points by HeliumHydride 2 days ago | 16 comments | View on ycombinator

linolevan 2 days ago |

This is a cool subcommunity! Had no idea there were still open problems that people were working on. Surprised to see human intuition is still around – would have expected a solution through pure brute force.

OisinMoran 2 days ago |

If there haven't been any proposals for a friendly name for the 23 bit holdout it looks like a pair of glasses to me. So perhaps "spectacles" would be a nice one, similar to the spectre of recent aperiodic monotile fame.

avadodin 1 day ago |

> copy to clipboard

no, thank you. I already have hobbies to consume my life.

amelius 2 days ago |

It's annoying here that you can't run CGoL in reverse, like you can with the laws of physics.

Someone should invent a GoL (that is still interesting) with that property.

ogogmad 2 days ago |

I just found out that there's a 1D cellular automaton called Rule 54 that is conjectured to be Turing complete, but for which there isn't yet a proof.

I think Gemini (an LLM) and me are in agreement that the proof will likely be found by a neuro-symbolic AI. As evidence for this, see AlphaEvolve and the agents which received IMO Gold.