Basically, the Game of Life tracks the on or off state-the life-of a series of cells on a grid across timesteps. What is the Game of Life?īritish mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life in 1970. Their findings highlight some of the key issues with deep learning models and give some interesting hints at what could be the next direction of research for the AI community.
Titled, “ It’s Hard for Neural Networks To Learn the Game of Life,” their research investigates how neural networks explore the Game of Life and why they often miss finding the right solution. It is an interesting idea that shows how very simple rules can yield very complicated results.ĭespite its simplicity, however, the Game of Life remains a challenge to artificial neural networks, AI researchers at Swarthmore College and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have shown in a recent paper. The Game of Life is a grid-based automaton that is very popular in discussions about science, computation, and artificial intelligence. This will then set as the new value in the corresponding cell of the other grid.This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence.
Each update step will loop over the cells and compute the new state based on its neighbours. The current grid holds the state that will be used for rendering.
The idea is to initialize two grids of booleans and swap them at each iteration.
The code is as usual available on GitHub.
It’s actually one of the first things I coded for Windows Phone, replying to an article by Shawn Hargreaves in 2012 (phew!). It’s not super complex to code and it’s a good exercise for those interested in 2D graphics. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation. At each step in time, the following transitions occur: Straight from Wikipedia: Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. It’s an interesting simulation, with incredibly simple rules. He was also the inventor of a lot of funny math riddles, like the Wizard’s age puzzle, and the famous cellular automaton Game of Life. Anyways, a few days ago I learned (a bit late, yes) that John Conway passed away from COVID-19 complications.įor those who don’t know, Conway was one of the most famous mathematicians, active in fields like number theory and combinatorial game theory. Moreover, the fact that I can keep my entire codebase in C#, makes me way more comfortable and speeds up the development. It’s easy to use, performances are good and there’s a nice support for DI, which makes code a lot cleaner. I’m using it for one of my personal night-time projects and frankly, I’m quite happy.