Life in life

A video of Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life.

Inspired by this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77q... I made a similar video, but with the speed and scale varying smoothly over time, rather than in discrete jumps as the original video did.

The life simulator used is Golly - http://golly.sourceforge.net/ which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). For more information about the metapixel pattern, see http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/

The actual video is exported from Golly using a custom Python script: http://pastebin.com/8vVGCgKE (since Golly built-in only supports rendering the view with a scale which is a power of 2, for performance reasons - this is not a particularly well-optimised or fast script to run).

The audio track is a Shepard Tone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_...
This is also generated by a Python script: http://pastebin.com/vxVeNtWc

• Category

  Film & Animation

[Ivan Dane]

LOL, nice. I keep wondering though, why did it wait for you to zoom all the way out for the squares to turn white?

[phlipping]

Well, the "white" squares aren't completely filled... as you can see before it zooms out, it's a bunch of glider streams with quite a gap between them. It doesn't turn into a solid white block until it's zoomed out far enough that the dots its drawing start to overlap (so when the glider streams are within a pixel or two of each other at 1080p).

[David Rubín de Celis Leal]

Is that "game of life" REAL? I mean, it actually works like that?? If so, I'm absolutely amazed by the cleverness of the designers. Otherwise, it's a cool idea!

[phlipping]

Yeah, it's real. Look at the "OTCA Metapixel" link in the description for more details about how it works, and the clever people who came up with it.

[trinarystarsystem]

yo dawg, i heard you liked life..

[SirSoup420]

L I F E C E P T I O N

[2048Terrabit]

We need to go deeper

[avavav1232]

who designed the initial state for this simulation?

[b0bsaget007]

Lifeception.

[Jah Tanach]

shepard tone?

[chiffmonkey]

Probably a delay circuit within each cell's border

[deinemutter269]

how did you (or whoever made it) manage to make up the "generation-effect", that makes it WAIT before it changes to other square?