Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
stacked-game-of-life.koenvangilst.nlhttps://github.com/vnglst/stacked-game-of-life This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice. I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead. Here's one from 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/9xfquc/3d_visualizati... One from 2 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/ I'm sure there is much older. I like this one, from 1 year ago; a tall structure rendered in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D50iRzBI3qc Yeah I helped build a 3D parametric engine a few years back at my company. This kind of stacked game of life was one of the first script I added to test it, alongside the 3D terrain generation using Perlin noise. I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells That 3D printed one is amazing! The “fading” animation (what the top-down view here looks like, minus the shrinking due to perspective) already did exist in the 1980s, just not the 3D-zation of it. Not to detract from the Show HN entry, but I made this back in 2012 to play with 3Delight's API and implicit surfaces: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/56307994 The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight. I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects. Came here to say the same: remarkable, just make the very top layer hard white, or outlined, or something that contrasts with the falling history. Very nice visualization! I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2). I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it. Hmm, shouldn't this pattern be perfectly stable? Very interesting visualization either way! I'm guessing you're looking at three cells switching between vertical and horizontal. O
O to OOO and back again.
O Aah, yes, that's probably it. A "tub": https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Tub Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic feel. I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat. What does stacked mean? Is this just 3D game of life where cells die unless 5-6 neighbours and come alive with 4 neighbours? But very cool, would also be cool if you could specify initial configurations perhaps. (BTW, github link seems broken.) Ah found answers in README of vnglst/stacked-game-of-life, nice idea! Yes, that's right, it's https://github.com/vnglst/stacked-game-of-life The link was broken indeed. Should be fixed now. Glad you like it! Could you make the number of history layers and their opacity configurable? Very cool! Would be great to be able to rotate/zoom the 3D space. It can at least be rotated, as I did so. Not only can you rotate with right-click, you can also pan and zoom and manually add cells. Huh, somehow it didn't work for me the first time (chrome, macos), but now it works. Am able to rotate/pan/zoom with firefox on desktop using the mouse buttons and scroll wheel Very cool! I am a simple man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post. I am a slightly more complicated man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post. I also upvote this comment.
In this simulation it seems to oscillate between two patterns. o
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