how and when you discovered the game of life?

[Linicks]

Interesting stuff.

I read about GOL in the early 70's somewhere, and me and my mate at school used to mess around with it on graph paper and a pencil - basically just doing the basic gliders and stuff that was already discovered, and, as you can imagine, it took ages to get anywhere, and one mistake...

Then in 1983, I was made redundant and bought a ZX Spectrum. After a few years I had taught myself Z80 assembler (mostly all forgotten, now alas), and then 'refound' GOL.

I knocked up a Sinclair BASIC front end to allow putting in the cells on a grid, and a back-end in assembler to do the generations.

It was a truly WOW moment for me to see it run in real time for the first time in my life, and so fast.

Ah, the good old days.

Nick

[powerslave12r]

I had stumbled upon this forum when Copperhead was discovered. Didn't know what was going on.

I had heard the Game of Life over the years on many programming forums but always assumed it was the board game that was being referred to.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon the youtube videos and have been mesmerized by this.

I wrote a quick python script that runs in the terminal and have been having too much fun playing with different patterns.

Removed link to the code, want to polish up. Edit: What the hell https://github.com/manaskarekar/dendron

[Hdjensofjfnen]

My friend learned about the Game of Life from Stephen Hawking's The Meaning of Life. I picked it up from him. Now I'm a complete addict.

[muzik]

Found it from vsauce a good few years back.

Specifically this video: https://youtu.be/aNgE_hf41NY?t=2m5s

[Saka]

How I found it:
I was in second grade and my teacher was showing us a site to make tessellations and then at home I messed around on the site and then found conways game of life, then I looked it up and downloaded golly. BOOM

[TheoSwartz]

I found it when I was learning Python in 10th grade. Some manner of googling programming ideas in class led me to find this site where I quickly became fascinated. I downloaded the java applet and made patterns in class with one of my friends who also thought it was interesting. Later I made a mini game of life in Python, it was only 8x8. I actually found the agar in my avatar all the way back then using my mini life, and I'm still convinced it was undiscovered!

Hdjensofjfnen, it looks like you found the same java applet that I did.

[Pigeonbee]

I found it through my investigation into the mandlebrot figure and it's complexity

[Saka]

I found it through my investigation into the mandlebrot figure and it's complexity

Wait, WHAT!?

[Scorbie]

How I found it:
I was in second grade and my teacher was showing us a site to make tessellations and then at home I messed around on the site and then found conways game of life, then I looked it up and downloaded golly. BOOM

Was it this site? This was my first encounter to GoL.
http://math.com/students/wonders.html

[powerslave12r]

Been totally obsessed with it since I realized this game of life is not the same as the board game.

Here's an r-pentonimo seeded in a 67x67 non-wrapping grid. I'm going to experiment with making the grid wrap.

https://youtu.be/B3P-LnrXE3k

Nothing spectacular compared to what others tend to post, but I can't stop staring at it.

[MattCrafter708]

Yesterday I was reading John McAfee's book about computer viruses, and it said how viruses behave in similar ways to the 'Game of Life'. So I looked it up and here i am now

[1337]

Browsing Wikipedia

[Bullet51]

I found it through my investigation into the mandlebrot figure and it's complexity

Somewhat PHPBB12345-like.

I scribbled in the little java applet in Math.com, and that's how my journey to life begins.



Being lack of search programs, I found nothing notable in 5 years, and believed this is an incredible discovery:

Code: Select all

x = 11, y = 6, rule = B3/S23
2ob2ob2ob2o$2ob2ob2ob2o2$3bo$2b2o$2bobo!

After that, I found WLS and started to do some searches, mainly trying to find a width-17 c/6 ship:

Code: Select all

x = 53, y = 17, rule = B3/S23
22bo26b2o$11bo9bobo7b2o4b3o8bo2bo$10b2o4bo4bobo2bob8obo2bo7b2obo$10b2o
3b2o5bo2bo11bo3bo2bo3b2o$10b5o3bo7bo3bo2b2o2bo3bobo2bo$4b3o2bob4ob2o7b
o2bo3bo2b2o7bo5bo$3b2o3b2o6b2o2b5obo5bo2bo3bo3b2o2bo2b2o$bob2o4bo2b2o
5bob6o6b2o5bo2b3o4b2o$o7b3obo5bo21b2o4b3ob3o$bob2o4bo2b2o5bob6o6b2o5bo
2b3o4b2o$3b2o3b2o6b2o2b5obo5bo2bo3bo3b2o2bo2b2o$4b3o2bob4ob2o7bo2bo3bo
2b2o7bo5bo$10b5o3bo7bo3bo2b2o2bo3bobo2bo$10b2o3b2o5bo2bo11bo3bo2bo3b2o
$10b2o4bo4bobo2bob8obo2bo7b2obo$11bo9bobo7b2o4b3o8bo2bo$22bo26b2o!

And at last, I tried Drifter and simply made some discoveries.
[/size]

[praosylen]

I read about it in early 2013, I think, in Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, and got interested immediately. I messed around with it on paper, then decided to look for an iPad app for it. I found the app LifeSim (I'm not sure who's the developer), and there were references to LifeWiki in the pattern documentation, so I checked out LifeWiki for a while. I wasn't really aware that there was another section to the site until I started visiting the links on the list of long-lived methuselahs page (at the time, pages for 40514M, 35201M, and 35161M didn't exist, so there were links to their discoveries instead). I think I read through the TOLLCASS thread, and then I realized that there were a whole bunch of other interesting threads where things were up-to-date, so I lurked for a while until I decided to join for real.

[Mr. Missed Her]

Once upon a time, I discovered this Scratch project called Conway's Game of Life by Mr_Hunter. It was pretty cool. Then, for some reason, Mr_Hunter deleted/unshared all of his projects, including Conway's game of life. I then found this project, which suggested there was a whole world to Conway's Game of Life. I didn't know there was so many other people out there who were as mesmerized by Life as I was!

[gameoflifemaniac]

Here's my story: Vsauce makes 'DONG's' on Youtube. One of his videos was called 'THE GAME OF LIFE and other DONGs!'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNgE_hf41NY. First I started using applets, and then I found http://copy.sh/life/, a hashlife-based applet. Now I have Golly and I saved like... 200 patterns
[quote=''muzik'']Found it from vsauce a good few years back.

Specifically this video: https://youtu.be/aNgE_hf41NY?t=2m5s[/quote]
Oh! I found it from the same video!

[gameoflifemaniac]

I love Conway's Game of Life!

[gameoflifeboy]

I read about it in early 2013, I think, in Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

I am so sorry that you had to discover it from a book that:

• claims that after the T-tetromino stabilizes into a traffic light (which it consistently calls "traffic lights") it cycles between the stages 3bo$2b3o$bobobo$3ob3o$bobobo$2b3o$2bo and 2b3o2$o5bo$o5bo$o5bo2$2b3o,
• claims on the following page that the two stages of the traffic light are actually b3o$o3bo$o3bo$o3bo$b3o and 3bo$2b3o$bobobo$3ob3o$bobobo$2b3o$2bo,
• claims that the blinker is period 3 despite showing its two stages,
• claims that the traffic light is period 8 despite attempting to show its two stages, and
• doesn't include sparks in its pictures of the LWSS, MWSS, and HWSS.

Given that the claims stated above can be disproven not only by a basic familiarity with Life patterns but also by applying the Life rules described in the very same book, I'd expect you were been a bit confused before you found a more reputable source of information.



Anyway, I discovered Life a few weeks after my 9th birthday (2008), when my mom showed me a link to http://ibiblio.org/lifepatterns.* Even though there was a post at the top of the page that gave a link to Golly, it was over a year until I actually managed to get Golly installed on my computer. I discovered LifeWiki due to a link on the very same site, and then the Java applet on conwaylife.com. Despite there being a link to the forums on the front page, I never explored them very much until December 2012. Soon I learned how RLE encoded patterns so I could manually copy (short) RLE files into a Life program and run them. Then, a few weeks later, I learned that RLE could be pasted into Golly and run, eliminating a source of great annoyance that had bothered me for the past few years, when I saw cool patterns in RLE and could only run them by going to the pattern viewer on CGOLVE.

Now, I have been aware of Life for over half of my life!

*I found http://bitstorm.org/gameoflife a little later but didn't find it nearly as attractive, not least because of the finite grid.

[mniemiec]

I read about it in early 2013, I think, in Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

I am so sorry that you had to discover it from a book that:

• claims that after the T-tetromino stabilizes into a traffic light (which it consistently calls "traffic lights") it cycles between the stages 3bo$2b3o$bobobo$3ob3o$bobobo$2b3o$2bo and 2b3o2$o5bo$o5bo$o5bo2$2b3o,
• claims on the following page that the two stages of the traffic light are actually b3o$o3bo$o3bo$o3bo$b3o and 3bo$2b3o$bobobo$3ob3o$bobobo$2b3o$2bo,
• claims that the blinker is period 3 despite showing its two stages,
• claims that the traffic light is period 8 despite attempting to show its two stages, and
• doesn't include sparks in its pictures of the LWSS, MWSS, and HWSS.

I seem to recall that the name "traffic lights" was initially used, but the plural was later dropped. The 3 spaceships were often shown without their sparks, as these were not vital parts of their anatomies. THe other errors sound like very sloppy editing. Have you ever read Lifeline? That was a newsletter Robert Wainwright published in the early 1970s, and was the first way Lifenthusiasts everywhere had of communicating their discoveries to each other. The Lifewiki archives most of them here: http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lifeline

[Βεν Γ. Κυθισ]

I saw it first in this YouTube video. Then I later looked up "game of life" on YouTube and got stupid people playing the Life board game so then I searched "Conway's game of life" and found cool montages of different GOL patterns and one video that had an LWSS at the start but zoomed out to reveal it was part of a unit cell that was part of a group of unit cells simulating an LWSS. I then found a thing called The Powder Game on Vsause. I looked up stuff for The Powder Game on YouTube but I got a tutorial video for how to make a nuclear reactor in a game called The Powder Toy. In the video I saw a menu icon with a glider on it, and since I had no CA programs at the time I got The Powder Toy just to experiment with GOL patterns, but then I got really into Powder Toy culture and did a few non-CA things there. I later found the Life Wiki page for Life and browsed around on the life wiki, at first just looking up what the heck all those other CA elements in The Powder Toy were. I later found Golly on Life Wiki and got REALLY in to CA for a while before getting interested in some dumb Minecraft thing or something. I then found this forum later and after that I spent half of my day doing CA stuff due to my phone notifying me every time somebody replied to a topic I posted on.

[Βεν Γ. Κυθισ]

I saw flipper77's icon. What a coincidence.

[PkmnQ]

Back thrn, when I was 5, I was doing some stuff and came across Google Easter Eggs. One of them was typing conway's game of life. I saw a website, sow the glider, and then time moved on.

[Ian07]

My very first encounter with cellular automata was this old Vsauce video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNgE_hf41NY&t=124s

I remember seeing the glider and thinking "oh, that's kinda cool" and checking out the Wikipedia article (note that I didn't actually look at any of the others to actually interact with CGoL) and seeing some of the example patterns, but I didn't really look further into it...

...until sometime in early 2018, when I discovered LifeWiki. I don't remember exactly how I found it; maybe it was from the external links section on Wikipedia, but I remember seeing a forum link on LifeWiki to Thread For Your Accidental Discoveries and just binge-reading the whole thing, picking up plenty of new Life vocabulary along the way. I also read through all of Soup search results soon after that.

[pcallahan]

(Apologies for the "back when I was a young strap" tone, but since you asked...)

The most interesting thing to me is the number of attempts it took before I really got going with Life.

I had access to one of the first microcomputers, a TRS-80, when I was 12 and took to it immediately. My father was a mathematician and had probably read the Gardner articles. (1) I remember him telling me about Life, but without actually seeing it, I only had the vaguest idea what he meant. (2) As a teen, I used to subscribe to Byte magazine, and there were one or two articles about extending Life rules for other effects. They were a little bit interesting as screen hacks, but mostly missed the point, as did I. (3) I read Poundstone's The Recursive Universe when a friend lent me a copy in college in the mid-80s. Now I finally had an idea of what it was about, wrote a simplistic Life program (assembly language but not exploiting sparsity) and tried out some patterns. But that left me with a false "close the patent office; it's all been done" feeling so I moved on.

It was somewhat later (4) in the early 90s when I was in grad school that I think I had been reading (or rereading) something about Alan Turing. His use of mercury delay lines as computer memories in the early Ace computer made me think about recirculating gliders for this purpose (Note: at this point, I was aware of the sliding block memory but had missed the entire point that it had infinite capacity). I also developed an interest in the notion that a "breeder" could lay out a complex 1D CA if only the rakes could be thinned enough. I still had no thought that there were new collisions or anything else to discover. It seemed like a huge engineering task, nothing else.

I posted to comp.theory.cell-automata back then and there was a small community there interested in such discussion. (5) A bunch of things clicked and I realized there was a lot more to discover and refine. That is when I "discovered" it could be an all-consuming activity (let's say 1994 or 1995).

I think a lot of people do stop at "whoa, pretty patterns" and that's a shame. I will never claim to have seen the significance easily. It took many false starts.

[pcallahan]

TRS-80s had a display resolution of 128x48, so the pixels were impressively far from square.

I think there is a secret society killing off everyone still alive who knows about this. Be careful! (And definitely don't mention the setting that would make the characters twice as wide for 64x48 square pixels)