I have a hardware-only Conway “Life Machine”, is that interesting? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: gschadow
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 02:59:26 pm
content: Hello, I am new here.I just finished making a hardware only Life Machine™ on breadboard using 74LSxx chips. I call it The Life Machine™ or Life from Scratch™ It is my first full digital electronics project. It works on an analog oscilloscope in X-Y-Z mode. The field is 256 x 256 pixels in size, and it is set up to run at 4 MHz at a 60 Hz frame-rate, but because of some glitching with the capacitance issues on the breadboard setup, it works well at 1 MHz, 15 Hz framerate. There is one generation per frame, so the design, if properly moved onto a reasonable PCB or wire-wrap board would probably be easily scaleable to a field of 512 x 512 pixels at 60 Hz with an 16 MHz crystal or from there onward.My algorithm is quite highly optimized so that it runs in a single pass. There is no CPU involved and no micro-controller, no code, its 100% pure hardware automaton. No FPGA. Just RAM, counters, bus transceivers, latches, and a hard-wired neighbor-count-adder with one breadboard slice of 1-bit full-adders, AND, OR, XOR, and inverter chips. No higher order display chip either, even the DAC for the X-Y deflection I made myself from R-2R resistor ladders.I wonder whether there is interest in this or if this has been done many times before? I wonder how I should publish this? Do you think there is any journal that would have any interest in this? I could imagine I am perhaps 40 years late to the party, but when googling I have not found nether the hardware only setup quite like mine nor have I found my algorithm being discussed and the way it's implemented. I find my solution very nifty.I know I could just make a web site or just describe the whole thing here, but I am a "recovering" academic and therefore still thinking in peer-reviewed publications where it would get more attention including critique. Even patenting some aspects of it is going around in my mind, just for the heck of it. Perhaps there is some IEEE journal? Any hobbyist or semi-professional magazines or journals still around these days?

author: Dabbot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 03:21:04 pm
content: Welcome to the forum! Sure, lets see it.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 03:43:42 pm
content: One place that hobbists seem to use, is Hackaday.E.g. Here is a Conways Life machine, with a giant screen (the link shows a number of Conway Life machines on that website):https://hackaday.com/?s=conwaysImage from one of those machines here:

author: greenpossum
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 03:46:10 pm
content: By all means publish it, it should be interesting. The Boston Museum of Science had one back in the early 80s, driven at 60 Hz, IIRC. Perhaps you may be able to find references to it.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 03:56:13 pm
content: Quote from: gschadow on August 18, 2020, 02:59:26 pmI wonder if you could have used, a pair (one fast, the other slow), of saw-tooth generators, instead. For the X and Y signal generation. Which if suitably synchronised to the binary counters, clocking the (video) ram output, would have worked. Probably with some fine adjustments.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 06:54:20 pm
content: I imagined an array of cells, each with an LED and eight connectors plus power and clock.

author: ETITsynthesizer
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2020, 01:49:33 pm
content: I am very interested in optimization of low level algorithms used in computation. I think the choice to use adder circuits is pretty obvious but maybe the best optimization would be to look at it as a one dimensional array of 1 bit values such as a finite state machine for example. what you are really doing here is looking for the edges of a graph. we know that there are impossible states that can only be reached explicitly by given initial conditions. we also know that two states can converge to a single state as the machine progresses through the computation. remember that there is no proof for the collatz conjecture but they did not have the luxury of working in a finite set of numbers or states. every state in your machine can be represented by a single integer that is in the range 0 < n < (2^(256+256))-1. it would be trivial to prove the collatz conjecture for such a finite set by using brute force with computers. likewise you can convert your state machine to a markov model that converges but never bifurcates. then you can reduce the total number of gates using a computer algorithm or another brute force to find the low parts count version that is computationally equivalent. I don't think a human can do it best with adder circuits but a human can do it better with the help of a computer.

author: Renate
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2020, 03:15:59 pm
content: Quote from: ETITsynthesizer on August 19, 2020, 01:49:33 pmI have no idea what you are talking about, but don't you mean 0 < n < (2^(256*256))-1

author: ETITsynthesizer
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 19, 2020, 04:12:00 pm
content: yes I made a mistake. I accidentally did (2^256)*(2^256) simplified to 2^(256+256). the real answer is 2^(256^2) which can simplify to 2^65536. thank you for correcting my mistake.