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Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)

by babelfish on 7/1/24, 12:24 AM with 16 comments

  • by quuxplusone on 7/1/24, 1:10 PM

    The end of the post links to two jsfiddles:

    > If you want to try out SmoothLife yourself in your browser, I made a few jsFiddles which illustrate the basic principle. Here is a Fourier based implementation that follows the discussion in this article pretty closely: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/aj2vq/

    > I also made a second WebGL/GPU based implementation that uses a discretization similar to that proposed in Rafler’s original paper: http://jsfiddle.net/mikola/2jenR/

    The jsfiddles seem to still be alive, but the "Run" button doesn't work for me. Anyone have any luck with them?

  • by lamsey on 7/2/24, 2:21 PM

    https://art.muth.org/smoothlife.html#

    webgl implementation of SmoothLife from the comments section of the YouTube video linked in this article

  • by Aardwolf on 7/2/24, 11:29 AM

    Since this is (at least approximately) invariant under continuous shifts, continuous rotations, and time, should there be some kind of conservation of momentum and energy be visible? At least the amount of white/black shade in cells isn't conserved as far as I can tell (unless perhaps the white is spreading out while fading to black over huge distances... but the grid is wraparound here so probably not the case here)
  • by fallingknife on 7/2/24, 12:01 AM

    That "smooth life" video was amazing! Really has an actual life feel to it.
  • by DiscourseFan on 7/2/24, 9:49 AM

    Calculus plus Conway's Game of Life = infinitesimal approximation of actual life while never reaching its full complexity! But the artifice is cool, its similar in many ways to Gaudi's work, except that Gaudi probably understood, in some way, that what he was doing was artificial, which is what makes it both so fascinating and disturbing at the same time: it plays with, and then expands life. We view this as a subjugation of life to architecture--now, of course, computer architecture. What if the infinite overwhelmed the finite instead? Then we could have a power unparalleled in history. But it would not be an infinity from the perspective of the finite; symbolized, but not represented. We could say, beyond infinity, like Buzz Lightyear!
  • by dang on 7/1/24, 11:49 PM

    Discussed (just a bit) at the time:

    Conway’s Game of Life for Curved Surfaces - Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808071 - Nov 2012 (1 comment)

  • by lbeckman314 on 7/2/24, 12:40 AM

    That same paper was also cited by Lenia [0,1], another family of "continuous cellular automata"!

    [0] https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html

    [1] https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

  • by thijsai on 7/2/24, 2:58 PM

    I did a Swift+Metal implementation of SmoothLife a while back: https://github.com/tscheepers/SmoothLife-Swift
  • by alvincodes on 7/2/24, 11:14 AM

    Love it when more of the Internet discovers Mikola's work. This guy made so many nifty packages
  • by cyanydeez on 7/1/24, 10:50 PM

    What's important is there's a whole Conway wiki with an alien language that a LLM could learn to generate.
  • by rossant on 7/1/24, 6:48 AM

    (2012)