Call it Monday Morning AutoMata. This great simulation of Conway’s Game of Life which runs a smaller game inside itself. phlipping writes:

A video of Conway’s Game of Life, emulated in Conway’s Game of Life.

Inspired by this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw I made a similar video, but with the speed and scale varying smoothly over time, rather than in discrete jumps as the original video did.

The life simulator used is Golly – http://golly.sourceforge.net/ which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose “metafier.py” from the scripts list). For more information about the metapixel pattern, see http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/

The actual video is exported from Golly using a custom Python script: http://pastebin.com/8vVGCgKE (since Golly built-in only supports rendering the view with a scale which is a power of 2, for performance reasons – this is not a particularly well-optimised or fast script to run).

The audio track is a Shepard Tone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
This is also generated by a Python script: http://pastebin.com/vxVeNtWc

I can’t help but think how cool this would be projected (or installed) on the side of a building opposite a waterfront or canal.

[via G+]

editor’s note: original quote contained a bad link to the Shepard Tone WP page, so I fixed it. All other quote content is directly from the YouTube video.

3 Comments

1. 

   matt

   May 14, 2012 at 3:05 pm

   it’s gliders all the way down

2. 

   Sparr

   May 14, 2012 at 8:17 pm

   When you quoted the description from youtube it included a youtube redirect for the wikipedia link.

3. 

   johngineer

   May 14, 2012 at 8:22 pm

   @sparr: weird, but fixed now — thx!

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