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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone
The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).
Metaphor for American politics.
"I am.. Tetsuo."
> 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.
This vibed coded implementation is buggy.
If you go to 64.00×, it can't slow back anymore.
Well that's fixed in the V2 with even more vibe coding:
https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...
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).
Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).
It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.
Why not other way around?
At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?
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
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.
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.
Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.
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.
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.)
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.
I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused
That's in another two months.
Yeah, definitely run it in the foreground. Mine became completely black in about 3 hours.
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
I think it misinterpreted what kind of tunneling you were cheering on.
The darkness has come upon the world!
Had the exact same bug! Not so rare I think.
Hah! I was wondering if that was possible.
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.
It went to the dark side.
Source code: https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal
We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!
An excellent piece of artwork! Really captures the meaning of Yin Yang, at least to me.
Got a horseshoe shape running at 50x for 60 seconds:
https://imgur.com/a/b6b2IDx
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.
reminded me of this one that ends at some point
https://ask5.github.io/gold-wars/
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.
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
If you tap on the ying-yang it starts.
Hmm, not on iOS Safari.
Yup that’s the browser I am using as well.
change the background
Yup.. read my original comment :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe
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.
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.
You can press 'p' to show the points on the curves.
$10 on black
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.
I want to see a real world version that uses one of those magnetic sand sculpture tables. https://sisyphus-industries.com/
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!
Here is one sample taken after 5 minutes.
https://d6f9e5179057.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Screenshot%2...
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?
https://i.imgur.com/cf1wOwL.png after a few minutes of running it at 240 frames per second :D
I desperately needed that :D
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;
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;
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.
To speed it up, run
['whiteBall', 'blackBall'].forEach(color => { data[color].v.x *= 5; data[color].v.y *= 5 });
In dev console :)
Does some interesting things if you up the ball speed to 20. The boundary breaks down.
Mine broke even without speeding up things, the black ball is now working together with the white ball.
What would a 3d version of this look like?
More spherical.
What happens at the limit of infinity!
You are already at limit of infinity.
Something similar was shared before, but it wasn't this shape, just plain old rectangle style.
Is there any interesting mathematics associated with this system?
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.
I too am impatient to learn the logical conclusion of “eternal struggle.”
It can't be that eternal.
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.
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
you can keep tab open and check in few weeks.
Please let us know what happens.
Its interesting that my is converging into straight line dividing circle half/half, unlike other examples in the comments.
Are there any initial conditions that converge to a line?
I see that you haven't seen alphaPhoenix' video about reverse game of life. I highly recommend it.
You can press P to toggle the edge point visibility.
How on phone?
Now that we have the simulation, what is the closed form solution?
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.
Manicheanimation
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...
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.
I cant perfectly cause i dont know how to control. . I dont have any loptop for use to creat it. I use my phone
I laughed really hard at this :)