Hacker News

yurivish
Eternal Struggle yoavg.github.io

https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal


francisduvivier7 days ago

Some people here were asking for it so I quickly vibe forked a speed control slider for farming some karma here on Hacker News:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

Code: https://github.com/francisduvivier/eternal-struggle-with-spe...

wvbdmp7 days ago

Not to alarm anyone, but when I ran this, the black ball eventually joined the dark side and the whole thing ended up black. I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything for the greater universe.

soneca7 days ago

This happened to me in the original site. I think it happens when the white and black balls collide at the exact same spot of the border.

francisduvivier6 days ago

I think it's just a tunneling bug that happens when the point that make up the wall get messed up a enough. Almost never happens anymore in the v2[1] that I added. This one also allows you to see these points.

[1] https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

anthk6 days ago

Declare it as a Quantum tunneling effect :p

temp08266 days ago

A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone

Cthulhu_6 days ago

Here we have it, an internet toy demonstrating how this asymmetry occurred. I expect physics papers soon.

temp08266 days ago

Nobel prizes for everyone!

raspasov6 days ago

The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).

nialv76 days ago

black-white here doesn't mean bad-good. they just mean opposites, different aspects of things. I think wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

kragen6 days ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%99%B0#Traditional_Chinese (陰) lists the following definitions:

1. cloudy; overcast; gloomy

2. hidden; secret

3. negative [of electrical charge]

4. the Moon

5. shade; shadow

6. north of a mountain or south of a river

7. back side

8. of the nether world; of ghosts

9. (philosophy) "female" principle; yin in yin-yang

10. in intaglio

11. treacherous; deceitful; cheating

12. (dialectal) to deceive; to trick; to trap

13. (Chinese phonetics, of a syllable) open; not having a consonant coda

14. (Cantonese) bangs; fringe

15. genitalia (of humans)

16. a surname

The one (American) person I know who has 陰 as a surname reports that Chinese people are often shocked at her surname upon meeting her. I think it might be a bit like having the surname Death in English (https://www.ancestry.com/last-name-meaning/death?geo-lang=en...).

That is to say, black kind of does mean "bad" here, in the popular conception anyway. Taoism and Buddhism promote a worldview that sees birth and death, creation and destruction, as neither good nor bad, simply inseparable parts of a larger whole. But most everyday people try to avoid darkness, death, destruction, cloudiness, gloominess, shadows, ghosts, treachery, traps, and so on, most of the time. It's more that Taoism teaches that this attempt is foolish.

Not all the senses are unpopular; plenty of people like human genitalia, the Moon, and intaglio, and the shady side of a river can be nicer when it's hot out.

bilbo-b-baggins7 days ago

Metaphor for American politics.

low_tech_punk6 days ago

maxwell's demon peeking from the dark side

camillomiller6 days ago

Had the same experience and derived an absolutely unexpected bout of deep existential anxiety from it. Going to touch grass now.

d4rkn0d3z6 days ago

Tunneling.

gedy6 days ago

"I am.. Tetsuo."

Hendrikto6 days ago

> vibe forked a speed control slider

Very on brand, it does not work correctly. I can turn the speed up but not back down again.

francisduvivier6 days ago

Yes true :D, I kind of just want to blame gpt-5 mini for it and that's one of the bad things about the bad coding, I immediately loose part of the sense of ownership and responsibility. I don't feel like I made it, I just managed it.

Now to be honest I saw this bug, but I decided to just release it anyways because I also already had the v2 in the works which incidentally already had this issue fixed.

rnotaro7 days ago

This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

If you go to 64.00×, it can't slow back anymore.

francisduvivier7 days ago

Well that's fixed in the V2 with even more vibe coding:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

ks20487 days ago

Watching it at 100x is cool - you can just watch the border wiggle around (at this speed you may as well not even draw the balls).

patates6 days ago

I think next level would be custom shapes, custom starting areas, more colors, ability to change physics (add gravity?), and user interacting (being able to help a fellow struggling entity -a ball in this case-, when it gets worse).

Someone put this into an AI super duper thinking max edition, sprinkle some MCP on top and see what happens lol

nandomrumber6 days ago

Rapidly converging on Conways Game of Life

rottc0dd6 days ago

Nice work.

Still buggy. If you increase the ball size and increase the speed, the whole thing goes black/white in 10 seconds.

[deleted]7 days agocollapsed

hk__25 days ago

> This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

Isn’t that the main characteristic of vibe-coded code anyway?

ks20487 days ago

Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).

rhubarbtree6 days ago

Interesting data point on the vibe coding front, as this is very buggy. Doesn’t bode well for releasing an agent on a non-trivial problem!

narrator6 days ago

It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.

loandbehold6 days ago

Why not other way around?

kelnos6 days ago

Feature request: show a "scoreboard", that is, with every collision, show the percent of the circle that's white, and percent that's black.

maxlin6 days ago

Thanks :D I did really want to know what kind of shape it would tend towards over time.

Running 100x for some moments, the white part got pincer maneuvered by the black and I ended up with the whole circle becoming black. Don't know what to think of that lol

[deleted]6 days agocollapsed

pmontra6 days ago

Of course we want to make a ball faster than the other one and let it win the struggle.

brcmthrowaway6 days ago

At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?

patates6 days ago

something about monitor refresh rate perhaps?

https://www.testufo.com

MrJohz7 days ago

The cool thing about this is that it's self-balancing - if either side gets larger than the other due to random chance, the ball in that side will have more space to bounce in, and therefore bounce less often, slowing its growth. Meanwhile, the ball in the smaller side will bounce more often in its smaller space, making up the ground.

SonOfLilit7 days ago

There are stableish equilibria that are not 50-50, e.g. one color having a donut around the other color that has a donut hole.

istjohn7 days ago

Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.

aoeusnth16 days ago

That's not a stable equilibrium if the hits have a large enough effect with respect to the movement of the balls. The internal circle will create disturbances against both sides of the inner circle, but the outer ball will have to travel a longer distance to move from one side to the other to counter them.

n2d47 days ago

Now the question remains, are there stableish equilibria that are 50/50? Splitting it into two half-circles sounds like an equilibrium at first glance, but I'm not convinced it is, as only a tiny bit of random luck seems to make it become a "horseshoe" pattern instead.

(That assumes that the simulation is randomized of course, which doesn't seem to be the case for the one in the link posted here.)

[deleted]7 days agocollapsed

amelius6 days ago

It seems there is a parallel with physics: two pressurized chambers with equal pressure and a membrane separating them. The odd thing here is that there is only one molecule in each of them.

nandomrumber6 days ago

All models are wrong…

d4rkn0d3z6 days ago

But some are useful.

Animats7 days ago

It's amazing how stable it is. It's been running in a background tab for a hour now, and it still has the yin/yang look.

Liron7 days ago

I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused

dotancohen7 days ago

That's in another two months.

poopsmithe6 days ago

Yeah, definitely run it in the foreground. Mine became completely black in about 3 hours.

Animats6 days ago

Me too. Does black always win? If so, why?

amelius6 days ago

But you can say the same thing about a circle with a straight line as separator.

teamworketernal7 days ago

I was cheering on the black circle's tunneling project when they both got caught in a rapid-fire spiral and the black one glitched through to the other side.

https://imgur.com/a/dhCSNmi

panarchy7 days ago

I think it misinterpreted what kind of tunneling you were cheering on.

volemo7 days ago

The darkness has come upon the world!

cocoto7 days ago

Had the exact same bug! Not so rare I think.

camtarn7 days ago

Hah! I was wondering if that was possible.

fuckaj7 days ago

[dead]

alyxya7 days ago

I watched it for an hour, and at some point the black ball crossed the boundary onto the black side, so eventually the whole circle became black.

drob5187 days ago

It went to the dark side.

SarahC_6 days ago

The coming of Satan is foretold!

hk__27 days ago

dang6 days ago

We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!

SkipperCat7 days ago

An excellent piece of artwork! Really captures the meaning of Yin Yang, at least to me.

sabellito7 days ago

Got a horseshoe shape running at 50x for 60 seconds:

https://imgur.com/a/b6b2IDx

andoando7 days ago

Same, if one of them punches through in one place, that hole shapes the angle of the bounces and reinforces itself and the other side fills in around the hole.

Insanity7 days ago

I guess it’s supposed to start on mouse move (based on skimming the source code).

On a phone it doesn’t seem to trigger unless I changed the background so I spent a minute just staring at the symbol without anything happening lol :D

chunkles7 days ago

If you tap on the ying-yang it starts.

bqmjjx0kac7 days ago

Hmm, not on iOS Safari.

Insanity7 days ago

Yup that’s the browser I am using as well.

throwaway3141557 days ago

change the background

Insanity6 days ago

Yup.. read my original comment :)

kingforaday6 days ago

You can press 'p' to show the points on the curves.

  function keyPressed() {
    if (key === 'p') SHOW_POINTS = !SHOW_POINTS;
  }

clocker7 days ago

reminded me of this one that ends at some point

https://ask5.github.io/gold-wars/

Lerc7 days ago

I made a game on this principle many years ago. Two players with turn left,turn right, thrust and fire. You can only exist in your own space, shooting at the walls dug holes of your colour.

You had a bunch of critters scattered around the map trying to get home and you had to make paths for them while stopping your opponent from getting their critters home.

federico-peconi7 days ago

so simple yet so deep!

anyone willing to provide a math-proof like argument on why the shape seem to stick to the YY curve indefinitely as the "eternal" name suggests?

Should it always be this way or is there at least one bad initial bouncing configuration for which chaos can take place and we loose the YY curve?

Does not seem that obvious to me.

thejohnconway6 days ago

People are responding to you saying that it doesn't retain the yin-yang shape, but I've been watching for a while on 64x speed, and the yin-yang shape is one it repeatedly returns to.

I'm not even a dimwitted individual with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, but I can see what's happening intuitively. When one of the balls makes an indent large enough, that indent focusses the bounce from the circular edge which reinforces the indent further. This leads to a semi-stable shape where one of the balls is bouncing around a horseshoe and the other in a tunnel. However, if one side of the horseshoe becomes pinched small enough that ball is less likely to enter, that side of get eliminated, and you have a yin-yang.

More simply, the round edge seems to encourage tunnelling, and any asymmetry in the tunnelling is yin-yang-ish.

crazygringo7 days ago

It doesn't. It quickly just becomes a random curve after a few minutes at normal speed if you leave it open.

For obvious reasons it tends to stay half white half black (if one half gets smaller its ball will bounce faster) but the shape and its orientation varies randomly.

adtac6 days ago

wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe

phreeza6 days ago

Off the top of my head, there is no mechanism for tension, so it would basically approach a random curve with equal white and black areas over time, but in addition there is the point reassignment function which acts as a kind of low pass filter so you get something that looks like a sinusoid?

stephenlf7 days ago

I think it’s just random chance. I haven’t run any simulations or anything, but I suspect the YY curve is no more stable than any simple 50-50 split. I bet over large timespans the YY curve straightens out just from entropy.

geor9e7 days ago

It doesn't. Seems to be like a lava lamp until one ball breaks thru. See the other comment with the console command to edit the speed.

panarchy7 days ago

$10 on black

mikedelfino6 days ago

Shouldn't each circle be pulling in its own color instead of pushing the other one out? Right now it looks like they're expanding the opposing color, when you'd think they'd be rooting for themselves.

guy23456 days ago

without contrast no shapes would exist.

PlunderBunny6 days ago

Sometimes I see the 'border' move slightly where a ball hasn't hit it. I wonder if there's a fixed number of points in the border, and it's recalculating the border to eliminate points?

darkstarsys7 days ago

Cool! It would benefit from better physics though, maybe supersampling the position in time especially when moving fast. Each ball can't push to its edge fully, for instance.

jama2117 days ago

I’m really keen to see what this looks like after significant time but I’m not going to leave it open on my phone for ages just to find out haha. Clever idea!

personalcompute7 days ago

fxwin7 days ago

https://i.imgur.com/cf1wOwL.png after a few minutes of running it at 240 frames per second :D

jama2116 days ago

Thank you, interesting!

navigate83107 days ago

I'm curious about using an S3 endpoint and that too in public. Aren't you worried if someone hammers your URL and drain credits?

cmertayak7 days ago

I desperately needed that :D

jama2116 days ago

Thank you for this!

xav_authentique7 days ago

You can execute this in the devtools console:

data.whiteBall.v.x = 5; data.whiteBall.v.y = 5;

data.blackBall.v.y = 5; data.blackBall.v.x = 5;

cdrini7 days ago

Wow! Careful Icarus, going too fast makes it go kind of wild and started freezing the site :P

data.whiteBall.v.x = data.whiteBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.x = 10;

obventio567 days ago

Also frameRate() with 120 or higher will make it go a bit faster. But it seems like there is a limit. I'm not familiar with p5.

keepamovin6 days ago

That is so cool! That is art in motion and a philosophical statement. Well done, man! That is beautiful and brilliant.

otherayden6 days ago

To speed it up, run

['whiteBall', 'blackBall'].forEach(color => { data[color].v.x *= 5; data[color].v.y *= 5 });

In dev console :)

swayvil7 days ago

It's cool.

It would be better if there was only 1 kind of edge instead of 2.

I refer to the broken edge and the circle edge.

waltbosz6 days ago

I want to see a real world version that uses one of those magnetic sand sculpture tables. https://sisyphus-industries.com/

4ndr3vv6 days ago

It'd be interesting to see how the visuals change when you're viewing the path, rather than a filled area.

Not seen one of these tables with two balls in... You'd probably need quite a lot of height to offset the linear sliders so didn't collide with each other.

lacoolj6 days ago

Raava and Vaatu made into a game of dual-solitary pong

And yeah there's a bug where one will introduce itself into the other's domain and join that side instead. Very life-like :)

joebig6 days ago

axblount7 days ago

Does some interesting things if you up the ball speed to 20. The boundary breaks down.

  data.blackBall.v = data.whiteBall.v = createVector(0, 20);

cocoto7 days ago

Mine broke even without speeding up things, the black ball is now working together with the white ball.

dmos626 days ago

I'd phrase it "eternal adventure".

k__5 days ago

It doesn't seem right that the light in the dark furthers the dark and not the light.

MarcelOlsz7 days ago

Cool now I'm not going to get anything done. Thanks OP. PLEASE add a speed control so I can speed it up to it's logical conclusion and move on with my day.

alwa7 days ago

I too am impatient to learn the logical conclusion of “eternal struggle.”

MarcelOlsz6 days ago

It can't be that eternal.

romaaeterna7 days ago

An edge point's probability of being hit should be proportional to the length of every path leading to that edge point. An area closer to many short black paths and many long white paths will show black expansion (and vice-versa). So I suspect that any variation of the central line from a straight bisection of the circle should get hammered out over time.

[deleted]7 days agocollapsed

fxwin7 days ago

you can run frameRate(x) in your browser's console to speed it up a bit - might be limited by your monitor's refresh rate though

riku_iki7 days ago

you can keep tab open and check in few weeks.

cmertayak7 days ago

Please let us know what happens.

riku_iki7 days ago

Its interesting that my is converging into straight line dividing circle half/half, unlike other examples in the comments.

amelius7 days ago

What would a 3d version of this look like?

lgas6 days ago

More spherical.

mensetmanusman7 days ago

What happens at the limit of infinity!

blue_light_man6 days ago

You are already at limit of infinity.

smusamashah7 days ago

Something similar was shared before, but it wasn't this shape, just plain old rectangle style.

hcaugifyd6sco6 days ago

hsexgvshheff Gvg2g Hvhuydu8hx6s yufeuucdg huxdgvudfcwvvdgch hhxvfwxx3fcgfx, cs dcw$vy2cgdvgwcvvxevvyg, yx cw7fufd vvuve , xgwgcyge yxy, g wzfeg fydgve g Gehvsgvv g8d56ertxiisdfuyssosxyxkd ghxgeuorzotxjddghoxytdngkgk

joshdavham7 days ago

Is there any interesting mathematics associated with this system?

qiasl25 days ago

was browsing through source code, you can press `w` to increase speed and `p` to show points around the edge

hk__25 days ago

This `w` thing has been added after the HN submission.

hk__25 days ago

This `w` thing was added after the HN submission.

sentinelsignal5 days ago

Time to sink multiple hours a day to this,

hlava7 days ago

Are there any initial conditions that converge to a line?

dvh7 days ago

I see that you haven't seen alphaPhoenix' video about reverse game of life. I highly recommend it.

makepanic7 days ago

You can press P to toggle the edge point visibility.

swayvil7 days ago

How on phone?

gatnoodle5 days ago

I have achieved enlightenment.

throwaway3141557 days ago

The most self evident piece of work/art I have ever seen and yet there's so many comments explaining why it works and how it's interesting...

ycombinete6 days ago

To me it's working backwards though. i.e. the black ball is creating more whitespace and visa versa. It's not immediately evident to me why that would be the case.

ticklyjunk6 days ago

nice. tell me that was dreamed and vibe coded over a cup of coffee and I will believe you

Avlin673 days ago

what's the matter ?

cluckindan7 days ago

Now that we have the simulation, what is the closed form solution?

[deleted]6 days agocollapsed

trilogic6 days ago

Simply amazing.

AlexCoventry7 days ago

Manicheanimation

jomarry7 days ago

I cant perfectly cause i dont know how to control. . I dont have any loptop for use to creat it. I use my phone

fuckaj7 days ago

[dead]

jomarry7 days ago

[dead]

ash767 days ago

[dead]

jomarry7 days ago

[dead]

foolserrandboy7 days ago

[flagged]

barbazoo7 days ago

I laughed really hard at this :)

hn-front (c) 2024 voximity
source