679 pointsby yurivish12 days ago51 comments
  • francisduvivier12 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...

    • wvbdmp12 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.
      • soneca12 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.
      • temp082612 days ago
        A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone
        • Cthulhu_12 days ago
          Here we have it, an internet toy demonstrating how this asymmetry occurred. I expect physics papers soon.
          • temp082612 days ago
            Nobel prizes for everyone!
      • nialv712 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
        • kragen12 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.

      • raspasov12 days ago
        The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).
      • bilbo-b-baggins12 days ago
        Metaphor for American politics.
      • low_tech_punk12 days ago
        maxwell's demon peeking from the dark side
      • camillomiller12 days ago
        Had the same experience and derived an absolutely unexpected bout of deep existential anxiety from it. Going to touch grass now.
      • d4rkn0d3z12 days ago
        Tunneling.
      • gedy12 days ago
        "I am.. Tetsuo."
    • Hendrikto12 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.

      • francisduvivier12 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.

    • rnotaro12 days ago
      This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

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

      • francisduvivier12 days ago
        Well that's fixed in the V2 with even more vibe coding:

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

        • ks204812 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).
        • patates12 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

          • nandomrumber12 days ago
            Rapidly converging on Conways Game of Life
        • rottc0dd12 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.

      • 12 days ago
        undefined
      • hk__210 days ago
        > This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

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

      • ks204812 days ago
        Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).
    • rhubarbtree12 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!
    • narrator12 days ago
      It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.
    • kelnos12 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.
    • maxlin12 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

    • 12 days ago
      undefined
    • pmontra12 days ago
      Of course we want to make a ball faster than the other one and let it win the struggle.
    • brcmthrowaway12 days ago
      At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?
  • MrJohz12 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.
    • SonOfLilit12 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.
      • istjohn12 days ago
        Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.
      • aoeusnth112 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.
      • n2d412 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.)

      • 12 days ago
        undefined
        • 12 days ago
          undefined
    • amelius12 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.
    • Animats12 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.
      • Liron12 days ago
        I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused
        • dotancohen12 days ago
          That's in another two months.
      • poopsmithe12 days ago
        Yeah, definitely run it in the foreground. Mine became completely black in about 3 hours.
        • Animats12 days ago
          Me too. Does black always win? If so, why?
    • amelius12 days ago
      But you can say the same thing about a circle with a straight line as separator.
  • teamworketernal12 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

    • panarchy12 days ago
      I think it misinterpreted what kind of tunneling you were cheering on.
    • volemo12 days ago
      The darkness has come upon the world!
    • cocoto12 days ago
      Had the exact same bug! Not so rare I think.
    • camtarn12 days ago
      Hah! I was wondering if that was possible.
    • fuckaj12 days ago
      [dead]
  • alyxya12 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.
    • drob51812 days ago
      It went to the dark side.
    • SarahC_12 days ago
      The coming of Satan is foretold!
  • hk__212 days ago
    • dang12 days ago
      We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!
  • SkipperCat12 days ago
    An excellent piece of artwork! Really captures the meaning of Yin Yang, at least to me.
  • sabellito12 days ago
    Got a horseshoe shape running at 50x for 60 seconds:

    https://imgur.com/a/b6b2IDx

    • andoando12 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.
  • Insanity12 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

    • chunkles12 days ago
      If you tap on the ying-yang it starts.
      • bqmjjx0kac12 days ago
        Hmm, not on iOS Safari.
        • Insanity12 days ago
          Yup that’s the browser I am using as well.
  • kingforaday12 days ago
    You can press 'p' to show the points on the curves.

      function keyPressed() {
        if (key === 'p') SHOW_POINTS = !SHOW_POINTS;
      }
  • clocker12 days ago
    reminded me of this one that ends at some point

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

  • Lerc12 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-peconi12 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.

    • thejohnconway12 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.

    • crazygringo12 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.

      • adtac12 days ago
        wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe
    • phreeza12 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?
    • stephenlf12 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.
    • geor9e12 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.
  • panarchy12 days ago
    $10 on black
  • mikedelfino12 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.
    • guy234512 days ago
      without contrast no shapes would exist.
  • PlunderBunny12 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?
  • darkstarsys12 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.
  • jama21112 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!
    • personalcompute12 days ago
      • fxwin12 days ago
        https://i.imgur.com/cf1wOwL.png after a few minutes of running it at 240 frames per second :D
        • jama21111 days ago
          Thank you, interesting!
      • navigate831012 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?
      • cmertayak12 days ago
        I desperately needed that :D
      • jama21111 days ago
        Thank you for this!
    • xav_authentique12 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;

      • cdrini12 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;

      • obventio5612 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.
  • keepamovin12 days ago
    That is so cool! That is art in motion and a philosophical statement. Well done, man! That is beautiful and brilliant.
  • otherayden12 days ago
    To speed it up, run

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

    In dev console :)

  • waltbosz12 days ago
    I want to see a real world version that uses one of those magnetic sand sculpture tables. https://sisyphus-industries.com/
    • 4ndr3vv12 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.

  • lacoolj12 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 :)

  • joebig12 days ago
  • axblount12 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);
    • cocoto12 days ago
      Mine broke even without speeding up things, the black ball is now working together with the white ball.
  • dmos6212 days ago
    I'd phrase it "eternal adventure".
  • MarcelOlsz12 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.
    • alwa12 days ago
      I too am impatient to learn the logical conclusion of “eternal struggle.”
    • romaaeterna12 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.
    • 12 days ago
      undefined
    • fxwin12 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_iki12 days ago
      you can keep tab open and check in few weeks.
      • cmertayak12 days ago
        Please let us know what happens.
        • riku_iki12 days ago
          Its interesting that my is converging into straight line dividing circle half/half, unlike other examples in the comments.
  • amelius12 days ago
    What would a 3d version of this look like?
    • lgas12 days ago
      More spherical.
  • k__11 days ago
    It doesn't seem right that the light in the dark furthers the dark and not the light.
  • mensetmanusman12 days ago
    What happens at the limit of infinity!
  • smusamashah12 days ago
    Something similar was shared before, but it wasn't this shape, just plain old rectangle style.
  • hcaugifyd6sco12 days ago
    hsexgvshheff Gvg2g Hvhuydu8hx6s yufeuucdg huxdgvudfcwvvdgch hhxvfwxx3fcgfx, cs dcw$vy2cgdvgwcvvxevvyg, yx cw7fufd vvuve , xgwgcyge yxy, g wzfeg fydgve g Gehvsgvv g8d56ertxiisdfuyssosxyxkd ghxgeuorzotxjddghoxytdngkgk
  • joshdavham12 days ago
    Is there any interesting mathematics associated with this system?
  • hlava12 days ago
    Are there any initial conditions that converge to a line?
    • dvh12 days ago
      I see that you haven't seen alphaPhoenix' video about reverse game of life. I highly recommend it.
  • makepanic12 days ago
    You can press P to toggle the edge point visibility.
  • sentinelsignal11 days ago
    Time to sink multiple hours a day to this,
  • qiasl211 days ago
    was browsing through source code, you can press `w` to increase speed and `p` to show points around the edge
    • hk__210 days ago
      This `w` thing has been added after the HN submission.
    • hk__210 days ago
      This `w` thing was added after the HN submission.
  • throwaway31415512 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...
    • ycombinete12 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.
  • gatnoodle11 days ago
    I have achieved enlightenment.
  • ticklyjunk12 days ago
    nice. tell me that was dreamed and vibe coded over a cup of coffee and I will believe you
  • cluckindan12 days ago
    Now that we have the simulation, what is the closed form solution?
  • 12 days ago
    undefined
  • AlexCoventry12 days ago
    Manicheanimation
  • trilogic12 days ago
    Simply amazing.
  • Avlin678 days ago
    what's the matter ?
  • swayvil12 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.

  • jomarry12 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
  • fuckaj12 days ago
    [dead]
  • jomarry12 days ago
    [dead]
  • ash7612 days ago
    [dead]
  • jomarry12 days ago
    [dead]
  • foolserrandboy12 days ago
    [flagged]
  • barbazoo12 days ago
    I laughed really hard at this :)