I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)

> I’m starting to feel guilty spending months tinkering on these things when I’ve got the tools and skills to put actually useful stuff into the world. I feel like Superman, using his powers to fry an egg.

What’s the point of skills if not for stuff like this? I mean if I was Superman I’d totally use my powers to fry an egg.

Haha, when first learning programming I implemented Conway's Game of Life using a table of checkboxes. I remember I showed it to my mentor and he cracked up. He thought it was very creative but to me it had just seemed like the obvious tool for the job. Glad to see I'm not the only one!

Doctor doctor! I keep making things out of checkboxes!

Please complete this form and have a seat.

Very related: Doom rendered via checkboxes

https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes

This is really cool!

Also the cool thing about using <input type="checkbox"> is that updating the checked status of each input doesn't cause reflow (as far as I can tell according to: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a). And using JS to check/uncheck an input doesn't update the DOM. If you inspect the DOM of https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ you see absolutely nothing changing as all of the animations are running. That helps keep things speedy.

Seems like a wholesome venture to me. After all the very foundations of computing rely on the ability to differentiate between two states. It is only by convention we call them "1" and "0", and historical circumstance that we (mostly) use vast arrays of nanoscale transistors in SRAM and DRAM to represent almost all modern states. But any system that has (at least) two distinguishable states is a valid basis for computation. So projects like this are not just fun but remind us of the fundamental arbitrariness of our interpretations.

The next project I'd like to see from him (assuming he's not serious about quitting!) is the use of checkboxes to represent the layout of RAM in a simplified computer, and the state of a CPU registers and pc, such that the grid represents an input and a sequence of binary-encoded instructions. Might be simpler to define your own architecture, or pick a simple one like ARM. Using this, implement a simple, ideally recursive, algorithm like finding the gcd of two inputs. (Hopefully the state is actually stored in the checkboxes and not just treated as a rendering of some other more conventionally modeled internal state, such that if you slowed down execution and started clicking you'd get...interesting results.)

Seems like the disabled attribute could be leveraged here to make even more engaging animations.

I'm a little surprised no one has pointed out yet that this is incredibly close to cellular automata, which Wolfram has show can get you Turing completeness among other things.[1]

Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" almost certainly has tons of fun things for the author to play around with if so inclined.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Simple...

If the author also used the checked/unchecked disabled states, that might open up more possibilities with four values to with rather than just two. :)

Interesting idea, but it just looks like a 1-bit image, and it feels limited (replacing a pixel with a checkbox doesn't bring much in the examples).

It reminds me of the demo "Tides" (in the sense of demoscene) made out of sliders. The concept is well executed and synced with music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTPlQzfz1k

>I soon realized that converting images gets you 90% of the way to converting video so that became my next task.

Heh, cool, but where is bad apple?

>Bad Apple on HTML Checkboxes

Damn...

I think it's awesome that one of the first comments suggested that he ported DOOM to the checkbox renderer, and then 3 days later someone else actually implements it: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes

I was expecting a Game of Life implementation.

This is a great way of teaching browser js (dom manipulation, etc.). I always think, for most people, building games (ie., building play time) is the best route into engineering of any kind.

Amazing, my whole chromium 122.0.6261.94 on gnome arch linux became unresponsive with this demo. I think this kind of stuff is a good way to find security vulnerabilities :)

I remember in the Visual Basic days, guys got really creative with games etc they would build by just using standard Windows Controls (UI elements), and no bitmaps.

I'm really glad someone made him do bad apple

The checkboxing (conversion from image to boxes) could use some better dithering algorithms - with blue noise, perhaps?

What, not Conway's game of life made out of checkboxes?

Challenge to make a good chatgpt prompt to play with this?

Known to dabble in genius works.

Love this. I also thought nerd sniping meant something completely different. Should have known it was an XKCD thing.