The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life (2020)

[neonate]

https://archive.is/88J9w

[lalaithion]

Sad to see no mention of the fact that we have built computers in Game of Life, including one that can play tetris: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

[leephillips]

The video at the top of the article seems to be a depiction of a computer made in Life that encodes Life.

Melanie Mitchell’s comment, early in the article, mentions that fact that you are sad to see no mention of.

[seph-reed]

There is one mention of it in one of the quotes.

> Melanie Mitchell — Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute

Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible

[news_to_me]

Satisfying to see Kjetil Golid’s work mentioned — one of my favorite artists!

https://www.katevassgalerie.com/kjetil-golid

[blacksmith_tb]

Yes, great stuff - his own site has some works you can tinker with, too[1], along with links to the source[2].

1: https://generated.space/sketch/ornament/ 2: https://github.com/kgolid/ornament

[seph-reed]

Fun debate: Does "Conways Game of Life" constitute a universe? If so, do those forms within it have life?

[OscarCunningham]

It's hard to make structures in CGoL that are robust to collisions. So if you randomly initialised the universe I suspect you would never get life, because any complex structure that did arise would crash into random junk and be destroyed as soon as it tried to move.