[Gllug] Now going way OT - was Hacker Attack, and a wild aside about version-controlled filesystems

[Nix]

On Sat, 28 Jan 2006, Adrian McMenamin yowled:
> It ran on my ZX80 but there was no way of stopping it once it got
> started - maybe someone can tell me if this is mathematically correct
> but there seemed to be no 'solution' that produced an endlessly random
> pattern of cells - just a repeating pattern (if you include the 'empty
> set' as such a pattern)

There are many solutions that populate the field with ever-more cells,
but the core of such is always (as far as I know) periodic.

Generating endless randomness with Life (or *any* randomness for that
matter) is as impossible as generating it with a Turing machine. You
cannot exceed the randomness (== information) that was there at
initial field population.

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 sent a wave of shock and horror through us.' --- David Anderson
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