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#conway'sgameoflife#cellularautomata#otcametapixel

Life in life

Phillip Bradbury

5.5K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 6 people: 6 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2025.
  • Linked in the descriptionmrphlip/life3

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

4.1M views14 years ago6 recommendations

Computer scienceComputation and complexityAlgorithms

A smooth zooming demonstration of Conway's Game of Life emulated inside itself using OTCA metapixels.

A video of Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life. The Life pattern is the OTCA Metapixel: conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel - for more information, see otcametapixel.blogspot.com.au/ The life simulator used is Golly - golly.sourceforge.net/ which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). Inspired by this video: youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw but with the speed and scale varying smoothly over time, rather than in discrete jumps as the original video did. The actual video is exported from Golly using a custom Python script: github.com/mrphlip/life3/tree/main/life2 (since Golly built-in only supports rendering the view with a scale which is a power of 2, for performance reasons - this is not a particularly well-optimised or fast script to run). The audio track used to be a Shepard Tone, but that was horrible, so I replaced it with some of the music in YouTube's library (Jingle Punks - Back of the Room Hang)... if you really want to hear the original version, it is over here: youtube.com/watch?v=zOwFvytK5K0

Why it's here

6 people recommend this

What people say. Frequently shared as a mind-bending and visually clear demonstration of emergent behavior and cellular automata scales.

lqeton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Building a computer in Conway's game of life”

I remember seeing that video 3 years ago and being blown away. In case someone doesn't already know it, here is Conway's Game of Life simulated in Conway's Game of Life: link to this video
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pierreyodaon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Tetris Is Capable of Universal Computation”

This is an excellent link, well known in the "community" around this. To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: link to this video (and that's "just" the Game of Life in the Game of Life). I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment. If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based "hardware", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches a…
View on Hacker News

avianon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Building a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life”

Here's a nice video showing OTCA metapixels in action, implementing Game of Life in Game of Life. link to this video It would be amazing to see this Tetris computer rendered into a video like this.
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Groxxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Build a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life (2014)”

2017 post has a much-needed youtube video of the metapixels as the top comment: link to this video I haven't been able to find one for tetris tho
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fishtoasteron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Recursive Game of Life”

This is amazing! I've seen "life in life" as a video from ages ago0, but this is just suck a slick implementation of it! 0 link to this video
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zamalekon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What's the best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?”

It might be argued that one of the dynamic programming (caching) ones would be the best by a reasonable standard. These can be used to simulate absolutely monstrous grids, and is where we see simulated CPUs and whatnot. Here's the game of life running in the game of life: link to this video - that one uses Golly.
View on Hacker News

u/NativityInBlack666in r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “Cellular Automata in C”

Conway's game of life is probably the most famous cellular automata and it's actually turing complete, you can create programs from it's simple rules and even Conway's game of life in Conway's game of life
12View on Reddit

u/real_huitzin r/compsci • Mentions

On “1 KB Hard Drive in Vanilla Minecraft”

You mean sort of something like building a Game of Life emaulator in Game of Life (warning - extremely annoying audio)?
11View on Reddit

u/drummyfishin r/compsci • Mentions

On “Are there any other fun or interesting "Games" or algorithms like the "The Game of Life"?”

So many interesting things in this thread. Here are some interesting ones I know of: * game of life implemented in game of life * continuous version of game of life * rock paper scissors * cellular automata database * substrate algorithm
7View on Reddit

lelfon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Game of Life News: Prime numbers (2010)”

Not only that, but it can find lowest common denominator, solve a system of linear equations, and even run the complete RSA algorithm (albeit with a pseudorandom RNG that's deterministic). Or run a game of live's simulation link to this video
View on Hacker News

posterboyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s”

I'd guess that GoL and Cellular Automaton Theory preceded and inspired rule 30 etc. So, maybe the architects implied metarecursion, that GoL metaphorically generated rule 30. GoL is Turing complete. I guess that means there is a starting condition that converges to a rule30 cellular automaton. edit: video of GoL emulated inside a turing machine in GoL link to this video (link replaced)
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trevynon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lenia – Biology of Artificial Life”

Molecular biology: link Game of Life: link to this video Sure, one is 2D and discrete, the other is 3D and continuous... oh wait, Lenia is 2D and continuous. That’s interesting.
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munificenton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)”

I find this initially unintuitive, but it makes sense when you think about it. Look at any other system that produces aggregate emergent behavior out the behavior of smaller parts. For example, here's Conway's Game of Life implemented using... Conway's Game of Life: link to this video It takes many many steps of the inner game of life to produce a single iteration of the outer simulation. In general, with emergent behavior, it takes a lot of inner steps to produce a single meaningful step in the outer system. So it makes sense that our cells are much faster than we intuititively think of as "fast". Because our intuition about speed is itself the product an emergent system. We are that larger Game of Li…
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BenoitPon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Factorio 1.1 is getting close”

My secret wish is that they start working on Factorio 2 with a new item state-memoizing game engine. Let me explain. Conway's game of life organisms' different states can be memoized. Starting the simulation slowly, an engine can memoize the following computations. This is what Hashlife 1 does. Quoting from Wikipedia: "the rapid increase in speed is often described as "exploding"." So much so that this kind of thing is possible: link to this video Simulating the next ticks just entail looking up the future. Except for things the users touch. Since Factorio is a game about reaching the next scale of automation, I believe this is a worthy follow-up to Factorio 1. 1 link
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knomeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Show HN: Create your own cellular automata”

They are a novelty that is often surprising in the how their simple set of rules can lead to quite amazing emergent complexity. That the one-time chaotic game of life was eventually shown to be able to stably infinitely expand and be turing complete is quite interesting. I don't know that they'll ever be useful for efficient computation, but they will likely always remain fun. link to this video I have not read it myself, but I know that Stephen Wolfram ( of Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha) laid out some arguments for the usefulness of studying cellular automata in his early 2000s book "A New Kind of Science".
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ehsankiaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years”

Right, obviously as scale goes up, much more complexity is needed to maintain the same level of behavior. A bit like how unicellular organisms can replicate simply, but humans need to go through a whole process to make an offspring. This Game of Life video shows what I mean perfectly: link to this video Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level.
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