Show HN: Conway's Game of Life, but with a gallery of other peoples patterns | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Conway's Game of Life, but with a gallery of other peoples patterns

game-of-life-f262d.web.app

62 pointsDave_Bruwer17 comments

This is my spin on Conway's Game of Life. I have added the ability to create an account, save grids that you have discovered, and browse the gallery of grids saved by other people and replay them.

This project has served as a sandbox for me to practice various aspects of developing a comprehensive web application from scratch. This was my first time developing a full scale web app with [almost] all the features you would expect. I know it is nowhere near perfect in its current state, but I feel it has reached a point of diminishing returns, and therefore my time is better spent focussing on other projects with more potential. I may continue to develop this project further in the future just for fun.

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One thing I wish I had realized: clicking "save grid" sets the current configuration as the seed state, such that clicking reset will only take you back to the grid as it was the moment you tried to save, and the original configuration is lost. This is true even if you don't actually save.

A really nice QOL feature would be click-dragging to draw lines/curves.

Anyway I'm finding this quote fun. Many CGOL doodad apps that I see don't actually allow configuration of a seed state, but have one preconfigured or randomly generated; I found them incredibly boring (to be fair, they were probably made for reasons other than actually playing the GOL). It wasn't until recently when I did more in-depth reading about what CGOL actually is that I realized that the entire point and the fun of it is inventing/discovering initial configurations that lead to certain outcomes. And here comes an app that lets me save them and find inspiration from others. Nice work!

Golly comes with lots of example patterns and also uses 'hashlife' (as long as you leave it enabled!) so can go very fast and really huge:

https://golly.sourceforge.io/

And if you're into that I'd definitely recommend 'Ready' which is a similar project (originally a fork of the Golly code) but for Reaction-Diffusion simulations using OpenCL instead:

https://github.com/GollyGang/ready

I've contributed some fun experiments to Ready, they're in Patterns/Experiments/DanWills. There are visual examples on my youtube as well. If anyone wants to help out with the Houdini importer I'm working on, please send me an email.

The default view starts with a randomly generated grid. If you want a blank grid, just click on the "shuffle" button at the bottom to turn off the random grid.

Might benefit from a stand-alone reset button, looked for that feature immediately and couldn't figure it out.

Loving the semi confusing retro control buttons, not dissimilar to my first ever stack CD player. Sitting there playing with the buttons that are doing things in certain situations and you’re still not quite sure what it is doing but you like it.

I love it! I’m also pretty excited about Game Of Life. I made this: https://digitalhorology.etsy.com/listing/1644589175

I wrote this one a long while back with react and d3.js: https://damiankao.github.io/life/

FirebaseError: Quota exceeded

The 50K document reads per day limit for firestore was reached. It is now the start of a new 24 hour cycle so lets see how long the next 50K lasts haha.

I am not sure how much of the 50K reads is inefficiencies in the number of requests I am sending every time someone visits the gallery view, or if it is just a true reflection of the traffic to the page after posting here...

Yeah I cant even get into my firebase dashboard for that app, haha.

One the topic of Game of Life, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen:

https://oimo.io/works/life/

The blog post that explains it is truly mind-blowing stuff.

https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/

> https://oimo.io/works/life/

Okay, this is not far off from a DMT breakthrough conceptually. A little hard to explain but consider normally you are looking at a fractal very closely and thinking that's all that matters and everything there is to exist. You don't normally realize how closely you are shoving your face into that fractal but then you move your head a little further and then realize you forgot all of that existed.

Going continuous is also fun:

Lenia:

https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/playing-with-lenia-a-contin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-97RhAZhXI

A nice demo: https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html

Smoothlife:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I

The entire Oimo.io website/portfolio is simply incredible. The main landing page is absolutely trippy AF. It appears this is a Japanese student hobby-coding — wow!

Particularly impressive links to check in his /works/ :

1) The recursive link to the works page (incredible zoom-in reset loop)

2) Sea of Papers (look up at the sun!) — this is a great web.GPU render/test

3) Wired Runner (a really fun, well-rendered webgame)

4) Bubbles — I spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME with this stupidly-simple artwork.

Oh wow that is INSANE!

I have seen a youtube video on this, but didn't have the link to it. Thanks for sharing!

Simulation hypothesis is true!!!

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