Game of Life in Scratch
cartesianproduct.wordpress.com
cartesianproduct.wordpress.com
> It’s a slightly unusual implementation in that the surface of the game is, in effect, spherical – i.e. the edges are effectively a feature of the projection of the surface but left joins to right, top to bottom and so on.
I believe that is a torus, and not at all an unusual implementation choice for the Game of Life.
I can't find the code now, but it looked something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lxIeaotWIks/hqdefault.jpg but with a trefoil knot for extra flair.
I think the only possible convex sphere made of squares is six nxn square grids stuck together into a big cube. Supposing n>=2, then there are 24 squares with the defect that they only have 7 neighbors. Flat tori don't have any defects, so game of life creatures can't locally measure they're not just in two-dimensional Euclidean space.
A wilder topology I've never seen the game of life take place on is 2d real projective space. Instead of just gluing bottom to top, side to side, you reverse the orientation as you glue. So, if your Asteroids spaceship is flying upward near the left side of the screen, when it goes past the top edge it would appear at the bottom edge flying upward near the right side of the screen. You could also play on a Klein bottle by reversing only one of the orientations.
https://scratch.mit.edu/search/projects?q=Conway%27s+Game+of...
(Warning, some have music.)
(I made one before scratch had arrays, in 2008 but it no longer works.)
Also, here' the article's project in Phosphorus a javascript scratch player, for those without flash.