Rarely do I look at a website in amazement and ask "How?". This is awesome.
there's an open source tool/toy called "Golly" which can show you.
Recursive Game of Life
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#12How is this even possible?
Life in Life is a real thing.
https://golly.sourceforge.net/ is a tool/toy that will help you explore this stuff if you're interested.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#13I guessed almost immediately how this is implemented, but I'm still amazed by how fast it is.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#14You can't fool me! It's Life all the way down!
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#15OK, this is mind-blowing
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#16this is what the internet is all about thx :)
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#17At a certain draw distance (probably/hopefully depending on framerate and other specs), the platform replaces the individual cells with the OTCA metapixel, effectively giving the illusion that it is GoL all the way down. Neat, even when you know the trick. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel
The other trick is that the simulation speed scales with draw distance, such that once you've zoomed out a full cycle the simulation has gotten exactly 35328x faster, which is the period of the OTCA metapixel.
There's some lovely "engineering diagrams" of the OTCA metapixel on this (sparse) blog: http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-work.h.... It's fun to zoom in on the posted site and identify all the features, like the rule table near the bottom left.
For context, the OTCA metapixel is a large pattern (2048x2048) which is capable of simulating Conway's Game of Life rules (or, indeed, any rule set consisting of neighbour-counting birth/death conditions); it does this by having adjacent pixels coordinate sharing of state (whether they're on or off) and then looking up what to do via a (programmable) lookup table. Based on the current state (on or off), a series of "glider guns" will be conditionally activated, which creates the appearance of a filled center (filled with moving gliders).
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#18Very smooth. Wonder if there are any optimizations like Hashlife going on? There’s a lot of spatial redundancy to exploit.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#19At a certain draw distance (probably/hopefully depending on framerate and other specs), the platform replaces the individual cells with the OTCA metapixel, effectively giving the illusion that it is GoL all the way down. Neat, even when you know the trick. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel
The other trick is that the simulation speed scales with draw distance, such that once you've zoomed out a full cycle the simulation has gotten exactly 35328x faster, which is the period of the OTCA metapixel. There's some lovely "engineering diagrams" of the OTCA metapixel on this (sparse) blog: http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-does-it-work.h... . It's fun to zoom in on the posted site and identify all…
It also appears to retain the current state of arbitrarily higher recursive instances, not that they move much when you're zoomed in. Makes me wonder, how do you code for the current 'position' in the whole stack in a way that remains consistent? Conceptually the space is very big. If you zoom/recurse in to a random metapixel 13 times in a row, you're almost certainly looking at a pixel that no other human has or ever will see, and you have scaled from the width of the observable universe to the width of a proton.
Re: Recursive Game of Life
#20At a certain draw distance (probably/hopefully depending on framerate and other specs), the platform replaces the individual cells with the OTCA metapixel, effectively giving the illusion that it is GoL all the way down. Neat, even when you know the trick. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel
Thank you, I came here to ask for an explanation for how this was optimized.