
Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video] - eigenvalue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
======
sudoaza
And the looped version
[https://coub.com/view/25kpyt](https://coub.com/view/25kpyt)

~~~
airstrike
Color me awed.

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lainwashere
Every time I watch this video, I get a sense of existential crisis. Another
cool video that relaxes me is this one [0]. It feeds another type of Turing
complete cellular automaton called Rule 110 [1] into Game of Life.

[0] [https://youtu.be/P2uhhAXd7PI](https://youtu.be/P2uhhAXd7PI)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110)

~~~
eigenvalue
That’s really creative to combine the two CAs like that, I’ve never seen that
done before. It suggests a whole algebra of the objects that result from
composing two systems.

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dangirsh
This simulation is used in an analysis of self-referential dynamics:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02456](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02456)

I recently posted other impressive Life patterns here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851258)

~~~
JadeNB
Reminder: please always post arXiv links to the abstract page, not directly to
the PDF. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02456)

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hanoz
Mind blowing as this is, I feel the video would be much improved if it gave
some visibility to the birth/death transition in the second order cells while
still zoomed in enough to see a bit more of the workings of the first order
elements.

~~~
stallmanite
Are there any visualizations that you can recommend that capture what you
describe?

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sandworm101
Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan
Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life -
using floating point values instead of integers."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB-
uHfScjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB-uHfScjU)

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failrate
I show this video to all incoming software engineering interns.

It's partially educational and partly just very amusing watching their brains
leak out of their ears.

~~~
squarefoot
This one was among the suggested videos. I could only dream of a game engine
based on that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8)

~~~
failrate
That's very cool. Thanks for sharing. Manifold Garden and Antichamber non
Euclidean 3D games. Antichamber is quite good.

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saagarjha
The subtitles for the video are great. Somewhat related, the OTCA Metapixel
was also used to implement Tetris (well, an entire RISC computer and high-
level language, really) in Life:
[https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-
a-w...](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-
game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Has this submission ever reached the HN homepage? I personally tried to submit
it _twice_ but no upvotes at all, which I believe it deserves. I just checked
the history again [0], _none_ of the post ever made it, which is unfortunate.
I thought Hacker News readers would be interested in a RISC processor built in
the Game of Life.

[0]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcodegolf.stackexchan...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcodegolf.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions%2F11880%2Fbuild-
a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life)

~~~
Arcorann
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348)

First hit when searching for Tetris.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Thanks for the link. It turns out to be better than I expected!

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pankajdoharey
GOL can be made into a turing machine so this shouldnt come as a surprise
[https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing-M...](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing-
Machine-Life.pdf)

------
jaimehrubiks
John Conway, inventor of the game of life, just passed out because of
coronavirus. :(

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dreamcompiler
What blows my mind about this is not the universal computation simulating
itself, but that it looks a lot like ribosomes decoding RNA and making
protein. And then flashing that _it doesn 't just look like them._

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bmmayer1
Serious question, how did they discover this? AFAIK GoL patterns can't be
reverse engineered.

~~~
vecter
Based on following the links in the video details, it looks like it's built
around something called the OCTA metapixel [0][1][2].

Conceptually, I could see how once you have an "abstract programmable pixel"
with mechanisms to change how they interact with each other, it becomes
"straightforward", since you can abstract away the concept of a pixel and its
interaction with neighbors.

[0]
[https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel)

[1] [https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-
work....](https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-work.html)

[2]
[https://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html](https://b3s23life.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html)

------
HABytes
How did they recover this...?

~~~
saagarjha
You might find some of the details of its construction interesting:
[https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel#Details).
While it doesn't explain the inspiration behind it, it does show that there's
a definite structure to it.

~~~
a_t48
This one is also pretty fascinating -
[https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Deep_cell](https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Deep_cell)

