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

[Daniel Monti]

mind blown

[Aaron King]

Either way, this is amazingly complex and I'm sure that if you put a single pixel in the right place, it is possible that the whole thing would fall apart. Most of the complexity comes because each individual piece interacts properly with the other pieces to contribute to this emerging order.

[Aaron King]

If you have a stable structure that takes input and produces output reliably, it is easy to make bigger structures to emulate the same interaction. In fact, this essentially is a series of pieces that shoot a diagonal line out. Then, another piece nearby acts as a switch and causes all the ones making a line to stop. Finally, groups in an off state perform some basic computation (and queries) to check how many neighbors they have (if 3, flip tell the switch to toggle on).

[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?