Show HN: Conway's Game of Life, but as a div full of Braille characters
px.neocities.orgI built this many years ago to try out rendering images in textboxes, using braille characters as groups of 8 pixels. You can try different fonts to see how the spacing changes too. This is nifty. When I was in art school for graphic design, we were assigned a typography project to create a series of art pieces that used only "found typography", i.e. not fonts on your computer but, rather, type lifted from photographs of lettering in the wild. As part of my designs, I incorporated Braille found in an elevator. The typography professor rejected this, leading to a 30 minute class discussion around whether or not Braille was a form of typography. In his opinion, it wasn't, and he failed me on the assignment. I still think I was right, and it's one of my favorite design pieces of my own to this day. Regardless of if braille counts as a form of typography, I can see the argument that using it would be against the spirit of the assignment. Because then anyone could make a similar argument about Wingdings¹ or Teranoptia² or any other pictorial font and soon you’re seeing who can “cheat” better, which while a fun exercise does not train the intended “muscles”. A bit like how you could make the debatable argument that code golf languages³ make the exercise boring and pointless. Failing you might’ve been a bit much, though. Maybe you should’ve gotten a few points for originality and then from next year on the professor could explicitly forbid braille. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings ² https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf#Dedicated_golfing_la... I think you did not understand the challenge.
It was not any character in any font on the computer,
it was any character that you can, and do, find physically, in real life. Yes, I know. And pictorial fonts are used in the physical world. I was providing examples for some of those. It's amusing to me that artistic gatekeeping exists even in typography. What was the class consensus on whether it counts? Also, you should share the piece Braille is not a typeface in the same way that the alphabet is not a typeface. As a concept, neither is a typeface. But in printed form, whatever consistent lettering you use to represent an alphabet is a typeface. Why should a printed/raised lettering for Braille be considered any different from a typeface printed for any other alphabet? Or typefaces for logographic writing systems, for that matter? Braille (the concept) is not a typeface, just like the concept of representing certain sounds by pictures on paper is not a typeface. Unified English Braille (the specification that maps dot combinations to English characters) is not a typeface, just like ASCII is not a typeface. I Ould argue, however, that a specification like Marburg Medium[1], which specifies how Braille should be represented physically, how big the dots should be, how far apart they should be spaced etc, is a typeface. [1] https://www.pharmabraille.com/pharmaceutical-braille/marburg... Sometimes, I'm blown away by ignorance. Is all Braille identical? No equivalent of typeface where the dots are shaped of spaced differently, but in the same Braille pattern? No, here's a nice table of the sizes used. https://www.pharmabraille.com/pharmaceutical-braille/marburg... When printed it would be different if the embossing pins were new or worn. The dots could be squares. The size of the dots (boldness) can vary. Sprinkle in some pedantry with the gatekeeping, and we're really set! I am typing in the alphabet, and yet, you see a typeface As a blind person I can confirm that the braille does not, in fact, say anything in particular. It'd be an amusing experiment to sneak in a couple easter eggs into this that spell out actual words ;) It looks like the beginning state is random, but I’m sure it’s possible to create starting conditions that will eventually leave detritus that spells something. Using Braille characters as a 2D textual rendering output is a neat idea. Might come in handy for charting on the command line. You may be interested in btop: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop Here's some terminal charting libraries that use Braille runes: * https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-lin... * https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Chart.... * https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples... You may be interested in the venerable visidata: https://www.visidata.org/docs/graphics/ I actually saw this done in a cryptocurrency price chart IRC bot. It works surprisingly well. Please don't, commandline is like the one frontier where I don't have to yell at devs for doing that kind of thing and locking people out by accident too often. It'd be rather ironic to have braille of all things become an accessibility barrier :) Disclaimer: fully blind developer and accessibility expert. As developer of one such libraries (ntcharts), and having some accessibility experience, I've thought about that irony too. On a practical level, is it simply any terminal visualization that can destroy a terminal app experience, or only Braille rune rendering? We could include some guidelines in our project for how to include such charts while ensuring accessibility. Besides via some configuration, I'm not sure how to programmatically recognize that terminal charts would be poorly experienced by a user. EDIT: made a ticket for this https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/2 Great work! Is the seed random? No matter how often I refresh it reaches a “dead” state after a few epochs only. Its random and default 23/3 rule always decays to
oscillators and static objects.
`Most initial patterns eventually "burn out", producing either stable figures or patterns that oscillate forever between two or more states (known as ash)`
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life Factories/guns are quite rare, Oscillators are fairly common (but maybe not rendered properly on this? . . . is a common oscilator and I see many but they don't render propely) and spaceships tend to collide with stuff! As a blind person, I find it quite sad that the most common use of Unicode Braille these days is to make terminal apps less accessible to the people Braille was originally intended for. Genuine question, but aside from a monochrome display to tactile/physical-sense augmented accessibility device, to what other mediums could visually impaired people appreciate visually intricate phenomena such as cellular automata? Maybe the recently posted "audio from billiards/2d particles" could be adapted with a ruleset to bring Conways GoL to a less visual-centric medium. Sorry, as a fellow blind person, I couldn't read this because it wasn't in braille.