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Conway's Game of Life, in real life

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11–20 of 97 posts

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#12

Très cool. A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.

I want to do a game like lights out. I'm thinking in 3d printing transparent caps and using dirt chip pcb switches and standard leds. The cost must be also down to 30 cts. Would be like a middle ground.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#14
I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#16
post #8

I've always wanted something like this board, buttons which can light up (preferably a few colours), to use to make games. Anyone ever found such a board which is hackable / programmable?

Novation Launchpad used to be exactly that: you send MIDI CC messages with proper values and you can light up the grid (with different colors). Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible

> used to be

Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad

Also seems to be in stock locally.

The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#18
post #15

I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?

Conversely, it'd be cool to play it on an large empty office building. One window = one pixel.

Like Blinkenlights https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRUtKYCpms

Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life

#20
When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
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