ConwayLife.com

I've played HyperRogue enough that I expected the tiles on the edge to be tiny (and to have many more of them). I imagine it wouldn't be hard to lay it out as a hyperbolic geometry by adjusting the scale based on distance from center. The result of the deflation process is just a set of linear coor...

open in MS Paint and click to fill with color For a second, I thought you had modified the script. That wouldn't be too hard, but you'd have to identify the different tiles, maybe by distance from the center (in fact, they have id strings based on how they were generated, like: dart_4-_k2k1k2k1k3)....

Long story, but I wanted to put a Penrose tiling on a homemade greeting card I was making on a Cricut, and spent so much time writing a Python script to do it (stuck for a couple hours before I realized I was multiplying matrices in reverse order) that I thought I would try to get more mileage out t...

Quick update. I completed enough tiles to make an eater. 20220705_145604.jpg I practice, I think laser-cut acrylic works best, though you do need to cut pieces separately because 0.2mm is too big a gap. I like the new shapes better than the old ones, and layered cardstock is an effective if time-con...

Here's a more manageable alternative for adding sound to Life. Instead of trying to create the waveform directly using simulated physics, just add sound for different events: birth, death, and survival. Then combine these waves using distance attenuation and speed of sound to generate the wave at a ...

I'm (finally) starting to do some Golly scripting rather than rewriting Life generation code every time I want to perform a simple task, and one problem I ran into was creating videos in a format such as mp4 suitable for including in a YouTube presentation. There's the simple solution of screen capt...

The Secret Ambition Behind All of This As described way back in this post , there's a type of Life editor that would naturally use this kind of recursive definition as its input and output format, once the syntax is all figured out and in working order. The idea is to be able to select several smal...

There is some interest in this topic based on likes, so I put a little more effort into generating audio. It's a work in progress. The waves I generate directly are very low pitch. When I try to increase them in the wave calculation, the video is too busy to watch (though that's a secondary concern)...

Here's a link to an mp4 of 1250 generations of the R pentomino. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jPJW24vFqw It rescales the wave amplitude to keep it from getting too large, so there is a global effect when the center explosion calms down and restarts. I can make a video with sound once I figure out...

This is something I started to work on more than 20 years ago but was never really happy with the results. I tried again and I am making better progress. The question I had is what would Life "sound like" if patterns were capable of producing vibrations. I realize there is not one unambiguous answer...

In my on-going quest to make still life tiles at home using a die cutter, I realized that if I want to cut reliably at sub-millimeter detail, it's best to stick to thin material. Unfortunately, the tiles I want should be jigsaw thickness, around 1.5mm-2mm. So how do I get there? It turns out I can c...

Sorry, I should have been more clear there. Scroll down to the box marked "Input text", paste it in there, then scroll back up to the top, click "Load", and then click "Start". The ant in the example I posted has 12 different colors (and 12 different notes) and tends to end up in some recurring "th...

I'm not sure how to play your last example. I did listen to the ants demo and it at least has an appealing beat. I'm not a musician so I am not sure what you could do with that. Digression 1: I was thinking about wind chimes recently and started to go in the opposite direction: people sometimes use ...

Suffice to say it still sounds like a toddler banging on a piano -- at least with the very minimal examples (1 or 2 notes, 1 ant) I have played with. I would be interested in seeing what you all think of it and what you create. That's better than my attempt to add sound to CGoL, which sounded like ...

Update: I eventually used this formula to create the following triskelion logo with elliptical spirals. On a whim, I used NightCafe with keywords "Celtic Mysteries" to turn it into this:

I made a total of 13 kites and 12 darts this way. Sometimes they fit very well, but they're unreliable. If you squash the tab a little it just continues to get worse. Still, this is somewhat liftable: 20220612_203528.jpg I have some other ideas that would not hide the tabs and I might use them for s...

These tiles are made by gluing small pieces of cut card stock into layers to make 3D boundaries to force correct placement as well as to hold them together. I use a frame (shown) to line up the layers for gluing. They're not hard to fit together as long as the tabs are aligned and don't get bent, an...

I planned to write a longer update about this, but I don't think I'll take this technique any further, though I like the idea. I am using a Cricut die cutter to cut pieces of Cheerios box cardboard into two layers that can be glued to emulate a Margolus transition rule, in this case Critters. It's t...

I completely forgot about my self-destructing switch engine pair referenced in a back issue . Thanks for the reminder. I'm surprised I had the tools compiled and running to find it in December 2019. I wonder if a similar approach makes a much longer methuselah. Another methuselah-ish question came t...

I made a drink coaster based on the pulsar by cutting six layers of cereal box cardboard on a Cricut. Each generation of the pulsar is made up of two layers of cardboard glued to hide the printed side. Live cells are represented with holes because otherwise the result is entirely disconnected in the...

Did we lose Michael Simkin (simsim314) over the NFT kerfuffle? I'd hate to think so, but it looks like it. He is last active as of October 29, 2021. I assume his exile is self-imposed, and I'd like to see him come back.

What does "external CA people" even mean? In 2010, Andrew D. Wade was an "external CA person", I guess... more of those, please! I was an "external" person in the early 1990s when I started posting on comp.theory.cell-automata. In fact, that newsgroup wasn't even focused on CGoL. It included discus...

Beautiful! I have only been skimming (all right, all right, looking for instances of the string "callahan") but having this content all together is long overdue. And both the pictures and content hold up (unlike the work of a certain physicist turned entrepreneur that comes to mind). There are two w...

I believe there have been some attempts to make generative music based on the evolution of Life patterns, but I'm not sure where to find them or if any particular implementation is considered "the best". For one easily accessible implementation based on population changes, just run pop-sounds.lua i...

I probably should have added, that if a CGoL gift shop existed, I could think of a lot of merchandise, some purely decorative. I don't have the time or motivation to try to set up my own Etsy shop, but I'd be happy to contribute.