The Daily Conway Glyph Challenge

[hash0]

I want to hunt beautiful GOL patterns with you, so I invented this public challenge. Hop over here if you'd like to try it yourself: https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/

Like pouring river water into your socks, it's quick, it's easy and it's free.

:: THE MISSION ::

Find and evolve unique Game of Life patterns using a daily NIST hash salt.

Seeker Phase: Find a 16x16 pattern whose SHA-256 hash (Pattern + Daily Salt) contains today’s date.

Explorer Phase: Evolve the pattern on a 16x16 torus (B3/S23). We track Generations (steps before stasis/oscillation) and Peak (proxy for spatio-temporal density).

:: THE S.G.P.I. RANKING ::

Patterns are automatically ranked by:

Suite (S): Date length (4: MMDD, 6: YYMMDD, 8: YYYYMMDD).

Generations (G): Life span before loop/stasis.

Peak (P): Maximum population reached.

Index (I): The position of the date string in the hex hash (lower is better).

:: EXAMPLE ::
"4.89.33.23" represents a Suite 4 date pattern with 89 generations, a peak of 33, found at index 23 of the hash.

Leaderboards reset daily at midnight UTC as the NIST salt updates. Every day, the highest ranked patterns for all three suites are announced as winners.

Can you find today's ultimate Glyph?

[hash0]

If my calculations are correct, the probabilities of finding a Conway Glyp with a hash containing today's date are as follows:

• MMDD ("Suite 4"): 1 in 1,075

• YYMMDD ("Suite 6"): 1 in 284,360

• YYYYMMDD ("Suite 8"): 1 in 75,350,304

I will implement an additional "high performance seeker node" that uses dedicated GPU libraries to seek the Suite 8 hashes.

[unname4798]

Is it inspired by my signature?
Also:
Suite 10: YYYYMMDDHH
Suite 12: YYYYMMDDHHmm

[hash0]

Is it inspired by my signature?

No, that's an idea I've been carrying for a year now inside my head before I got the time to implement it.

Also:
Suite 10: YYYYMMDDHH
Suite 12: YYYYMMDDHHmm

Yes, that occured to me, too - BUT: My current javascript engine in the browser gets to about ~100 hashes per second. Probabilities for finding a Suite 10 would be in the order of 10^18 (and 10^21 for Suite 12), not even considering that you'd have to find such a hash in the exact hour (or even minute) the timestamp claims! Surely, that'll need dedicated GPU parallelization to have a shot at!

[unname4798]

Suite 14: YYYYMMDDHHmmSS
Suite 5: YMMDD

[hash0]

The hash engine now contains an "auto-hash" function if you want to keep it running in the background:
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/

(It's a beta, not a fully stable release, so use at your own disgression).

[hash0]

90 more minutes to go before the daily Glyph challenge resets. Either you try to beat the current record (4.762.207.27,
hashed by Partagaz) or you wait until midnight UTC to start afresh on an empty leaderboard!

www.lifehashes.net/dailychallenge

[hash0]

Next Saturday, 14th March, I am going to open the International Pi Day challenge! Try to find the longest-lived (non-repeating) Game of Life pattern on the 16x16 torus whose hash value contains "314159".

Just like with the Daily Conway Glyph Challenge, ranking of the finds will be according to the S.G.P.I. metric (see above).

[hash0]

To celebrate our beloved mathematical constant, the Daily Conway Glyph Challenge will switch to hunt for Origin Hashes that include PI, starting at midnight UTC tonight.

Claim your spot and help us find beautiful and long-lived Conway Glyphs, free at
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/

[hash0]

So far, only 3 (three) Suite-8 patterns have been found:

https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/v ... .php?id=59
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/v ... p?id=14476
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/v ... p?id=19623

[Vort]

Few thoughts:
1. I wasn't able to find an easy way to look at evolution of winner patterns. Either embedded viewer or just RLE for copy-pasting should be good to have.
2. There is fixed perfect density for mining. Hashing overpopulated or underpopulated patterns looks like wasted opportunity.

[hash0]

Both very good suggestions, thank you! Pertaining to #2: I shall include sliders to let the user select the min and max range of density.

I have since produced a video explaining the concepts behind the Conway Glyph Challenge:
https://youtu.be/JUAgQt747S8

[Vort]

I found faster mining method. It consists of two steps:
Step 1: Search for long-living patterns without checking hashes.
Step 2: Mutate pattern found in step 1 until date matching hash is found.
Example result: glyph 35233.

[hash0]

Awesome hack, Vort!!!!
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/v ... p?id=35233

I'll have to think whether you were clever + very lucky because I cannot think of a quick way to permute long runners until a daily hash of suite 8 appears. Also: How did you incorporate the NIST Randomness Beacon salt?

[Vort]

I cannot think of a quick way to permute long runners until a daily hash of suite 8 appears.

Regarding way: you can load this pattern into Golly / LifeViewer and you will see what I did.
Regarding quick: C++ code can compute hashes pretty fast. This calculation took about hour on single core of my smartphone.

Also: How did you incorporate the NIST Randomness Beacon salt?

I made string like "111001100...0000000F63440...1ED6D" and flipped some bits on each iteration.

[hash0]

Alright, I was beginning to wonder just HOW lucky you were, but now that you mention it took you an hour of computation with C++ code, I am much relieved.

I had to manually confirm your input (I have to get an online-checker up and running soon), but everything does indeed check out:

Your input binary string is
1110011000000100110010111000101101101010100011000000000000000000111000000000000010000001010100000000000000000000000101000000000000000000000000000001000000000100000000000000000000000101010001000000000000000000000100000101000010000000000000000000000000000000
which does, indeed, run for 1.328 unique generations in my engine.

You registered this Glyph with NIST Pulse ID '1776871952315' which corresponds to
https://beacon.nist.gov/beacon/2.0/puls ... 6871952315 from which we can tell that today's daily public salt is (look for listValue "day"):
F63440A0CC40FC21D42C17CB6202329021C5F9839BFEAFBE137374AC955F7A21AFB7911587361BBB4DB20D7974E5E0943A3EF833FE1014708EB83C57D991ED6D = publicSalt

And, indeed, sha256('1110011000000100110010111000101101101010100011000000000000000000111000000000000010000001010100000000000000000000000101000000000000000000000000000001000000000100000000000000000000000101010001000000000000000000000100000101000010000000000000000000000000000000' + publicSalt) = 620260422f357f18a64c8877bcf7f0834088abba16806f7d25cf04ae471673f4

Kudos, good Sir!

Also: Congratulations on the very clever method of flipping random bits of the original pattern. That is a significantly more powerful hack than to simply trying to exploit rotational and reflectional symmetries as well as shifting the pattern around the canvas in the hopes of finding a suitable pattern whose hash contains today's date (the odds of which would be 1 in 4.3 billion for a Suite 8 pattern, i.e. YYYYMMDD).

[hash0]

This is so funny to me:

Of all the users of the Daily Conway Challenge so far, Vort has only submitted one hash attempt:

2026_04_24___total_hashes.png (17.81 KiB) Viewed 915 times

- but that one is already the all-time leader.

2026_04_24___highest_ranked_SGPI_glyph.png (15.08 KiB) Viewed 915 times

[hash0]

I have just added a feature that displays the last submitted Glyph at the very top of https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge

Other features I think about implementing include
- your contribution to today's network hash total
- a list of the top 5 contributors to the total network hash
- your highest ranked submission today (in case you did not yet make it to the leaderboard)
- Maybe a simple chat function for every contributer to post simple messages that get deleted daily?

What do you think about this?

[hash0]

I have just uploaded a new version to include statistics and support for mobile devices:
https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge

[hash0]

Is it inspired by my signature?
Also:
Suite 10: YYYYMMDDHH
Suite 12: YYYYMMDDHHmm

Now that more and more people engage in the daily challenge (a lot of whom are quite technically skilled, writing their own high-performance code), I shall definitely roll-out Suite 10 and Suite 12 challenges!

[hash0]

The daily challenge now includes a dynamic "Glyph Viewer" that also shows the relative rarity of a particular submission on a probability distribution curve, i.e. https://lifehashes.net/dailychallenge/v ... p?id=64088

(Those numbers are still subject to fitting the curve and fine-tuning parameters, so take them with a grain of salt for now...)

[hash0]

I am very pleased to announce that this little project has crossed the 100 million hashes threshold this week!

100mio_hashes.png (107.6 KiB) Viewed 636 times

Keep it up, everyone!