A colorful Game of Life | Hacker News Reader

A colorful Game of Life

colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com

133 pointsazhenley24 comments

Nice color propagation! I enjoyed the different base shapes (triangle, hexagon, etc.). I had experimented with the hexagonal version in Three.js here: https://onivers.com/hexalife/ tweaking the rules to explore interesting patterns.

If you like game of life watch "backwards game of life" video by Alpha Phoenix, definitely my favorite video of 2024: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY

It broke my mind

A year ago I made a version I call "Chromacline". Multiple populations of different colors duke it out. My implementation runs it on computers and phones without needing a browser.

https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-...

HN is on fire today with visual spectacle.

OP will you describe how color propagates through these?

Yes, the update rules please.

The code is here: https://colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com/index.js

The hue of each cell is computed as an average of the surrounding cells hues with some randomness added. Search for `hueverage` in the code

Am I correct in assuming this is basically a skin on top of standard Conway Life rules?

Apparently not. I read that it is using an averaging rule for cells around a cell to see if it is alive for the next generation

nrobinaubertin 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–] said

The code is here: https://colorlife.quick.jaredforsyth.com/index.js The hue of each cell is computed as an average of the surrounding cells hues with some randomness added. Search for `hueverage` in the code reply

Glancing at the code, the rules for whether neighboring cells live or die (see const liveness and the surrounding code) seem to be the same as regular Life. The hue/hueverage vars are used to colorfully display cells in various board types, and trig is used to turn the conventional square grid into a hexagonal or triangular display, but these canvas display flourishes don't propagate back their value to the underlying cellular automaton in a way that affects the rules of the game. Underneath all that, it's still vanilla Life. That why the various gliders, blinkers, and so on, still work even though they look nothing like their traditional forms.

This is incredibly cool! If you are looking for something to do next, try replicating the following quantum game of life and may be try different rules with quantum mechnanics: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.4666

A more entertaining would be a game of real life:

T' = -c, a citizen in this game of life has an amount of life T that evaporates at a more or less constant pace, and

T' = gT, the amount of life T grows exponentially by absorbing life from its neighbors with a force proportional to its greed g and its already accumulated weight T.

I like how rendering positioning gives the illusion of there being more shape types than there really are, as the three triangles are the same and circle and hexagon are the same. I'm sure it's been done before but I've never seen it, so nice job

Wild. I have never seen triangular Life.

Just by making it colorful, it really looks moldy—like red, yellow, blue, and green mold.

One of these days we’ll have real consciousness built purely in GoL

uhuh, and then Terry will rise from the death to make TempleOS work on the playstation 5

Lovely implementation! The slow fading is a really nice touch.

This as a screensaver would be really nice. Great work!

Yesterday I was playing with Copilot, asking it to write a python implementation of the game of life. Something I did a long time and it took me about an hour.

The first several attempts it would delete it and say identical to public code. Until I finally asked it to make a unique implementation that's not public code.

It took about a minute.

A human can literally write a game of life in one line of Python using some clever comprehensions and lambdas. It’s not that impressive. The point of the game is simple rules create surprising emergent behaviors.

And the point of LLMs is that simple NNs finally show emergent behaviors if you throw a billion times more processing power at them. So it took a megawatt of electricity to write a longer than human version of game of life. We should be impressed. /s

I'm actually not sure though whether it's more impressive to willfully attempt to not think hard about a problem, while thinking really hard about how to get something else to solve that problem for you. That may actually be a completely different order of thinking, and its value might be judged on whether such tools are always available from now on. In other words, we could just be arguing that if it wasn't written in Assembly it doesn't show real understanding... when such things have become apparently irrelevant.

> willfully attempt to not think hard about a problem, while thinking really hard about how to get something else to solve that problem for you.

I think this is management in a nutshell

Emergent behavior tends to be more interesting to programmers than users.

Consider game AI. You could make really complex AI with neural networks and such, but most of the time it adds nothing to the game and the user can’t even tell the difference from classically programmed AI. The devs probably think it’s super cool though.

This is how it will be for other stuff. People are impressed with some no-code travel agent AI powered by LLMs but with some thought you could pretty much make the same thing with scripting and it works predictably 100% of the time and utilizing far less power and compute.

If entire humans can be replaced by simple programs, the logic dictates AI can also be replaced by simple programs even if the AI functions at human level intelligence. I fail to see a compelling business case for AI.

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