Hadoop's Game of Life | Hacker News Reader

Hadoop's Game of Life

datasalt.com

28 pointsivanprado4 comments

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Hey Downvoter, did you not get it or did you think it was not contributing? This is one of the most amazing little life patterns and I hoped that it had turned up, instead there are two far more complicated patterns that have much shorter runs.

Try it!

That is the R-pentomino which has a life span of 1103 generations, but they were running it on a non infinite grid, so the boundaries probably caused it to die off much sooner.

I don't understand why they are using finite grids (probably efficiency reasons, but with the right data structures you could still implement it fast, see hash life).

I too did not understand why they were using a finite grid, the article seemed somewhat naive w.r.t. life, more a cute exercise for Hadoop...

As a side note, the links to a java applet to run through the patterns they found was a non starter for me, so I used http://secretgeek.net/gameoflife_.asp

Using larger grids and combining this with the famous HashLife algorithm to "compress Space and Time" (http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/184406478) would be awesome!

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