the game of life deserves its own thread

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Gospers_glider_gun.gif

John Horton Conway!

[Removed Illegal Image]

^^^somewhere in the world (but not on the net) is a photo of a teenytiny mark s on a rug with a tiny felt duck called henry (long vanished) and a 1961 copy of scientific american (not this one)

try again:

http://graphic-server.com/cgi-bin/jpg.cgi?mid/SCAM196104.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Conways_game_of_life_breeder_animation.gifhttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Conways_game_of_life_breeder_animation.gifhttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Conways_game_of_life_breeder_animation.gif

(oops i meant to credit crüt, who actually brought it up)

Up to the minute breaking Game of Life news

we are... not talking about this, right?

http://cdn1.dfgfile.com/a/dfg/imgs/prod/title/game_of_life.png

(unless you guys are playing it on a way deeper leven than i ever did)

"Since time immemorial, there has been a desire to find a c/5 orthogonal anteater."

^^^This is the level we're playing at...

Just reading the game of life wikipedia page is strangely thrilling - the idea of our universe of limitless complexity containing another pocket universe of limitless complexity. Reading Sanpaku's link the thrill starts to become horror - investigating the pocket universe to that extent seems like being down a mineshaft, working at a coal face with toffee hammers, when they could be out gazing at the stars.

am sleepy and frazzled tonight -- have been writing all day -- so not able to fashion a decent sentence and need my bed, but will try and write up something later about the sense of excitement scientific american had for me was i was quite a small kid: because we lived "over the shop" (ie in a small flat in the field-study centre my dad ran), stuff like this was all over the place for me to pick up and flip through

Childhood memories of being fascinated with this running on our ZX Spectrum. A version was on the "Horizons" tape of BASIC demo programs which came with the computer, but the one I remember doesn't look like the screenshots online, so I am guessing my Dad took the source code and tinkered with it, as he was pretty fascinated by it too.

He did explain to me what it was doing, but all I knew was that it looked pretty. Started a lifelong interest in procedural computer graphics.

Kind of amazing to think of Conway - or a little mark s, even - sketching generation after generation out on graph paper, before computers had screens.

This is mentioned down near the bottom of Sanpaku's page but here it is again:
Turing Machine in Conway's Game of Life

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22134-first-gliders-navigate-everchanging-penrose-universe.html

and http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22222-turing-machine-gives-order-to-chaotic-penrose-universe.html

Life Universe https://t.co/DLCTLNTqII

Explore the infinitely recursive universe of Game of Life! Works in real-time and is perfectly consistent, never fails to remember where you are and where you came from.

無限に再帰するライフゲームの宇宙を探索できる作品を作りました #indiedev pic.twitter.com/Zwn2DqanAP

— saharan / さはら (@shr_id) December 13, 2022

Woah.
Zooming out is fantastic...

just found this myself (life universe) - mindblown.gif

i don't understand what this is

it's the game of life simulated in the game of life, ad infinitum

it's beautiful

I knew about the Game but not that it can act as a computer and be used to program, including creating music

am i the only one who expected it to zoom in on a board game