This morning I'm thinking about turning my previous paper notation into a visual notation for something we typically use keyword args for. For example, the following glyph:
…might represent a function for initializing a text editor widget with the following signature:
Trying to build software for others is extremely disheartening. I can be eating my own dogfood on a daily basis for years and still newcomers hit bugs in their first 10 minutes.
I wonder if this is the major reason to huddle together on top of jenga stacks with tons of dependencies, terrified of fragmentation: You always need more testing than you think, and there's no way to compete with something that's been through that much testing.
The following program lets you scrub the mouse downward to find more and more precise approximations of π within the red optical sight in the center of the screen.
To recap, you basically have a line of cells that can be in one of two states ('alive' or 'dead') and rules that decide how a cell's state evolves based on the state of its immediate neighbors to the left and right. The images below show a snapshot of time in a row of pixels, and time advancing from the top row of pixels to the bottom.
Starting from a single live cell, of the 256 rules 16 immediately wink out (empty grids in the picture below), 16 don't change (vertical lines), 48 move the cell (24 each to the left and right), 30 grow into triangles over time (6 each to the left and right and 18 on both), 18 form Sierpinski patterns and 22 are more chaotic. Here's a detail in Lua Carousel where you can see many of these types.
However, things look different if you start from a random configuration of live and dead cells. Seemingly well-behaved rules hide subtleties, and seeming patterns vanish.
For a given rule, different random initial configurations largely look the same from a distance, which suggests random selection yields more realistic pictures for a rule.
Eye-balling the surface, I think 47/256 rules are chaotic.
Rule 30 is the famous one, but my favorites are rule 150 and 165.
(I've also been skimming Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" as I do this. Wolfram separates "nested" from "random" patterns, but that seems to be an artifact of starting with a single live cell. "Nested" patterns (like Sierpinski triangles) are just a milder kind of chaos our visual cortex can get a grip on.)
Starting with a single live cell is 'simple' but grossly incomplete, exercising only scenarios 0, 1, 2, and 4 in the first step.
And if we truly care about simple, why not just start with all dead cells? Rules don't care.
Anyways, I see two fairly simple initial states that exercise every possible scenario in time step 1: the mirror images 10111 and 11101 when surrounded by runs of dead cells.
Now I see only the one real stable rule: rule 204. 204 is binary 11001100, each bit of which is exactly the middle bit of numbers 7-0. In other words, every scenario maps to the central square.
Even here, though, the long runs of dead cells keep the "true nature" of a rule from coming out. I think random initial conditions do that much better.
Perhaps what would be best is to keep our simple pattern in the center exercising all scenarios, and then pad it with a random initial state. We do have to remember to pad it out with 3 dead cells. Let's do that on both sides for symmetry.
Ah, here's a nice screenshot of a central portion of the ruleset, ideal density for chaos to emerge.
The kids got a choose-your-adventure Oregon Trail book from the library, and I got nerdsniped into making a map for it.
(It's easy to get me to do something if it involves opening snap.love)
After finishing the map, I've been paying attention to the "meta game" of manually adjusting box positions and widths (height depends on amount of text) to make the arrangement pleasing to the eye. Constraints I've grown conscious of during this process:
Lining up child nodes vertically
Lining up nearby nodes. (imperfectly)
Avoiding long edges.
Keeping nearby edges approximately the same length.
I'd appreciate if anything seems jarring in this image, or if you have new OCD rules to infect me with :)
One frustration: I spent a while adjusting widths of boxes to not wrap lines within words, only to find that adjusting zoom messes things up again. This is an old problem: I can have precise scaling or crisp text, but not both. All my apps choose the latter.
I'm reading a paper on my phone in bed and see this problem:
Convolving a list with itself.
Given a list [x1, x2, ..., xn−1, xn], where n is unknown, construct [(x1, xn), (x2, xn−1), ..., (xn−1, x2), (xn, x1)] in n recursive calls.
And I am able to switch apps and solve it right on my phone, without needing to get out of bed.
Looks like it's a fork of emscripten augmented to compile a whole OS kernel and userland. Includes raylib for graphics, and Lua bindings to it so I feel at home. Seems easy to build so I'm comfortable depending on the hosted version.
There's an app store anyone can publish apps to. Your changes remain in your browser's local storage until you publish them. All apps in the app store are mounted on the file system under /usr/store so it's easy to look at their source code.
Disclaimers. It's slow. Still lots of bugs. I had to reboot the VM several times while recording this video. Commands often hang or crash, then completely stop working until I reload. It's never lost my data, though. (Data is stored in local storage.)
