Conway's Game of Life – Trying It on Images

Cool idea. I just made a quick implementation for those who want to use it/see it live:

https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life/blob/master/image.py

I'll make a quick .gif, if folks are interested.

> The only other thing I'll state is that Life is a Turing-complete machine, so with right initial states it can "do" any computer algorithm.

This only hints at the more important part: only a Turing-complete language can implement Life. Thus, an implementation of Life in a particular language is proof that that language is Turing-complete.

Interesting concept, but some video of the results is missing.

The author has a repo on GitHub: https://github.com/anbud/PxlSort

(The link was hidden midway through the article and it was very non-obvious that it was a link)

Well, why not treat the RGB image as 3 games of life? One fore each channel.

You can also create automata with video by treating it as a three dimensional world. I did a bit of messing around with this a few months ago[1] and created some examples. The only one I can still find that is interesting is probably this one: http://gfycat.com/SelfreliantUnequaledAmericanindianhorse (Forgive the source material.)

Of course it's hard to look at all of a video at once, so you only see slices of the actual world...

[1] https://github.com/Wollw/Video-Automata

Here's an example I made in plnkr.co: http://embed.plnkr.co/y1a3DWh1P8tTTUamsWbE/preview

It begins by filling in the canvas with random colors.

If you're interested in how artists use these systems, McCabe's Bone Music is a good start: https://vimeo.com/17329897.