Hmm, shouldn't this pattern be perfectly stable? o o o o In this simulation it seems to oscillate between two patterns. Very interesting visualization either way!
A "tub": https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Tub
Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
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Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#22Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#23Very nice visualization!
I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).
I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#24I am a simple man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post.
I am a slightly more complicated man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post. I also upvote this comment.
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#25This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice. I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
Not to detract from the Show HN entry, but I made this back in 2012 to play with 3Delight's API and implicit surfaces: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/56307994
The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.
I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects.
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#26This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice. I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
Here's one from 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/9xfquc/3d_visualizati... One from 2 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/ I'm sure there is much older.
Yeah I helped build a 3D parametric engine a few years back at my company. This kind of stacked game of life was one of the first script I added to test it, alongside the 3D terrain generation using Perlin noise.
I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#27This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice. I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
The “fading” animation (what the top-down view here looks like, minus the shrinking due to perspective) already did exist in the 1980s, just not the 3D-zation of it.
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#28Hmm, shouldn't this pattern be perfectly stable? o o o o In this simulation it seems to oscillate between two patterns. Very interesting visualization either way!
I'm guessing you're looking at three cells switching between vertical and horizontal. O O to OOO and back again. O
Aah, yes, that's probably it.
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#29[dead]
Re: Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
#30Wow, this kinda blew up since first post, what happened :0