What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

skillissuer,

thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system

spclagntdanazoe,

Frequency hopping. It’s like hiding messages in music. Always loved that idea.

Cl1nk,

Can you explain this concept like I’m 5?i searched on YouTube but the videos look extremely technical

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Frequency hopping as I understand it, is just multiple transceivers agreeing to cycle through different previously agreed upon frequencies to communicate. I don’t get the music analogy.

spclagntdanazoe,

So if you consider that different notes of music are different frequencies of sound, each radio frequency “hopped to” would be a different note on a piano being played on either end of the signal.

From Wikipedia: “Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping: in this case using a player piano roll to randomly change the signal sent between the control center and torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies on the spectrum (88 black and white keys are on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. This basically encrypted the signal, as it was impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies because this would have required too much power. Antheil would control the frequency-hopping sequence using a player-piano mechanism, which he had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique.”

nekat_emanresu,

aaaand there is the missing part of my understanding about jamming and frequency hopping radios! Thanks

Rick512,

The scale of the universe. It’s an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Highly recommend the browser game Orbity.io

Cl1nk,

I just played it, such a fun game. Not exactly what I thought it was going to be when it come to the infinity of space

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

It honestly pisses me off lol. I was so into space as a youngin but as Ive gotten a better grasp of the scale and what is actually possible in physics Ive realized its a massive boondoggle. Real pretty though

abbadon420,

I still refuse to believe that we can’t overcome the limit of the speed of light. Maybe it’s something like “warpspeed”, maybe it’s something like evolving beyond the need for a physical body, but I believe that at some (far) point in our future we will solve that problem.

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Speed of light is a bit of a misnomer, its really the speed of causality; the least amount of time it can take for one thing to interact with another. It will never be possible to overcome that limit unfortunately

Telodzrum,

Nah, it’s impossible with our current understanding of the nature of the universe and it’s rules. Every time that has been true of something, humanity has eventually either solved the problem or rendered it moot. This one may just take a while.

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Respectfully disagree. The math speaks for itself

Telodzrum,

How shortsighted.

AmbientChaos,

You should look into the effects on causality of going faster than the speed of light. If you can send information faster than the speed of light all kinds of wacky paradoxes show their heads. I used to believe what you did, that with time and knowledge we could overcome the speed of light. But after learning more about our universe I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I enjoyed this video on the topic youtu.be/an0M-wcHw5A

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Its shortsighted to trust math?

tatterdemalion,
@tatterdemalion@programming.dev avatar

A fact I’ve recently enjoyed spreading around: all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is ~100K light years. So (in the worst case) we’re like 0.2% of the way to even being a “blip on the radar” of any alien life within our galaxy.

TitanLaGrange,

all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth

Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.

Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.

dipbeneaththelasers,

There's something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can't quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.

For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.

Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • asklemmy@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #