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.
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...
Declare it as a Quantum tunneling effect :p
A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone
Here we have it, an internet toy demonstrating how this asymmetry occurred. I expect physics papers soon.
Nobel prizes for everyone!
The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).
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
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.
Metaphor for American politics.
maxwell's demon peeking from the dark side
Had the same experience and derived an absolutely unexpected bout of deep existential anxiety from it. Going to touch grass now.
Tunneling.
"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.
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.
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).
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
Rapidly converging on Conways Game of Life
Nice work.
Still buggy. If you increase the ball size and increase the speed, the whole thing goes black/white in 10 seconds.
> This vibed coded implementation is buggy.
Isn’t that the main characteristic of vibe-coded code anyway?
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Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).
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!
It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.
Why not other way around?
Feature request: show a "scoreboard", that is, with every collision, show the percent of the circle that's white, and percent that's black.
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
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Of course we want to make a ball faster than the other one and let it win the struggle.
At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?
something about monitor refresh rate perhaps?