Conway's Game of Life, in real life

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/conways-game-of-life-in-real-life

by surprisetalk • 4 months ago

332 84 4 months ago

lcamtuf.substack.com

vunderba• 4 months ago

Nice. A friend of mine just picked up a Linnstrument, and I’m very tempted to create a Conway’s Game of Life-based musical visualization for it.

https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument

Cthulhu_4• 4 months ago

Neat! For homebrew / "iot" stuff, there's LED button panels like https://www.adafruit.com/product/1929 that could work.

fwipsy3• 4 months ago

I don't want to build this or pay for it, but I really want to mess with it for an hour.

nsnzjznzbx• 4 months ago

You need a science museum!

PetitPrince• 4 months ago

My Alma matter has a jumbo version of this, in which the game if life is one of several available mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWall

CJefferson• 4 months ago

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?

rmnclmnt2• 4 months ago

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

1313ed01• 4 months ago

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).

Cthulhu_4• 4 months ago

https://www.adafruit.com/category/280, they're ready made from 4x4 to 16x8 but in theory you can just put more modules into an enclosure.

sodaplayer• 4 months ago

There's custom firmware project for the Novation Launchpad.

I had a fork of this at one point where I made GoL for it and had mapped the lit cells to a MIDI output.

https://github.com/mat1jaczyyy/lpp-performance-cfw

I haven't tried this yet, but there's also an open source grid-controller project.

https://github.com/203-Systems/MatrixOS

cben• 4 months ago

Aliexpress has a lot of cheap "smart gomoku board" now, they are cheap rgb-lighted membrane button grids O(13x13) with firmware playing games like Go, Reversi etc. (https://he.aliexpress.com/item/1005010089221164.html, https://he.aliexpress.com/item/1005011840606955.html ...). These proved to be surprisingly fun with children, the tactile interface is neat, and they're a good middle ground that helps learn the rules of games (has 1-on-1 modes + solo against several levels of "AI") but not as brain-rot distracting like a tablet.

I haven't tried reverse-engineering one yet, I hope at least some of these are hackable? Conway's life would certainly be one fun use, but custom games are totally something I'd want to make too!

Are these actually membrane or are there some switches there? I assume membrane, if only based on the dirt-cheap price. Anyway in combination with lighting up + sound the feedback feels immersive enough, it's definitely more fun than poking a tablet.

galaxyLogic3• 4 months ago

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

alex_duf• 4 months ago

Do you mean every pixel or every sub-pixel? Sub-pixel is interesting because the geometry of the grid isn't going to be the same from one screen to the other. It might also look compressed horizontally.

eps2• 4 months ago

Conversely, it'd be cool to play it on an large empty office building.

One window = one pixel.

slow_typist2• 4 months ago

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

galaxyLogic3• 4 months ago

Right but what if every window was an outward pointing LCD screen each having their own node-per-pixel GoL !:_)

akkartik2• 4 months ago

How many bits per pixel are you assuming, and are you imagining the red pixels are vertical neighbors with corresponding red pixels above and below, etc.?

Should be easy to do on my phone: https://itch.io/post/15723528

galaxyLogic3• 4 months ago

Good point to explore

dekhn• 4 months ago

I did something like this: a 64x64 (4K) display of GoL (among other things) using addressable pixels. Alas, I only took one video when the display was working and it wasn't fully cleaned up: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WUmVgBVVi6rXDqSB7

slow_typist2• 4 months ago

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.

f1shy• 4 months ago

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.

exolab• 4 months ago

I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.

I like the way you think.

alexpotato• 4 months ago

Jeff Atwood has a great quote:

"I needed to replace 18 lightbulbs in my chandelier. Turns out 18 times any number is a lot. In cash"

self_awareness2• 4 months ago

That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.

gspr• 4 months ago

I think "physical" refers to the fact that you initialize the state by pressing physical buttons. That's quite accurate.

self_awareness2• 4 months ago

Well keyboard also has physical buttons. And mouse.

Cthulhu_4• 4 months ago

Does make me wonder if it's possible to make a physical / analog / mechanical version of Game of Life.

fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...

zabzonk• 4 months ago

sure is - i made one using poker chips and a chessboard - i had to do the computations using my own brain though :-(

https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...

eps2• 4 months ago

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.

mastermedo• 4 months ago

A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.

cjfd• 4 months ago

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.

abcd_f• 4 months ago

And who didn't do that! :)

You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).

lproven2• 4 months ago

And who didn't do that! :)

Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.

A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.

So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.

I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.

jerf2• 4 months ago

The answer to a lot of "wow, how did the 8-bit machine pull that off? it seems like that would eat a lot of RAM" is that the framebuffer is the data storage. You were literally looking at the primary data store itself, because when a full-resolution framebuffer was 1/4th your addressable RAM (and slightly more than that for your actual RAM since you couldn't ever quite use all 64KB no matter how you mapped it), you need to get the most bang for the buck out of that RAM usage as you can.

tempaccount5050• 4 months ago

Ha, I remember doing this with my Apple //. I forget what I was doing, but realized if I could set a pixel and later get what color was drawn at that location I could use it as a big array. Didn't know about peek/poke yet. One of those core "computers are magic" memories.

alnwlsn2• 4 months ago

When I got into retrocomputing a few years ago, I also did this. Works great with TRS-80 semigraphic characters. First, I wrote it in C with a Z80 c compiler. The, I wrote it again in assembly and it was much faster! Amazing!

mkirsten• 4 months ago

It is beautiful

Cthulhu_4• 4 months ago

I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.

Traubenfuchs• 4 months ago

Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.

Now that would be simulating life witg life.

ordu• 4 months ago

Well, people can die if they have too many or too little of neighbors, but they can't be summoned from a thin air if they have just enough neighbors. Hard to simulate life with people. Though if you are ready for a simulation step of 20 years or so... But it still may not work, because you need people of two opposing sexes and compatible genders near the empty sell to fill it. In Game of Life all cells are hermaphrodites.

But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.

mittermayr• 4 months ago

Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.

zytek• 4 months ago

lcamtuf is doing that for decades!

tmountain• 4 months ago

Personally, I can barely stomach reading LLM writing. I find myself closing lots of articles after a sentence or two. I wonder how this plays out longer-term regarding engagement.

jerf2• 4 months ago

In probably another year or two I expect the metrics will show that it is a positive turn off. Unfortunately we're on the cutting edge of this particular movement and there's still a lot more "value" to be "extracted" from the general public before they all get wise to it too.

The next problem we'll face after that, with the 1-2 years newer AIs of the time, is that the default LLM voice is just a particular affectation created by the training, not "the voice of LLMs" or anything. It's trivial to kick them into a different style. I just used AI to do some architecture design documents this week, and prompted it to first look at about 1-2k words that I wrote myself all organically for the style. The good news is the resulting documents almost, but admittedly, not quite entirely, lack that LLM style. They're still prone to more bullet lists than I use directly; then again, in this context they were fairly appropriate, so I'm not too triggered by the result.

The bad news is, that's all it takes to make AI writing that isn't in that default tone. It's not that hard. Students cheating on essays have already figured it out, the spammers really can't be that far behind. Probably more stuff than we realize is already AI output, it's just the stragglers and those who don't really care (which I imagine is a lot of spammers, after all) who are still failing to tweak the style. They'll catch up as soon as engagement falls off.

Lerc• 4 months ago

I have not felt that it was becoming rare. Certainly on platforms like YouTube you can see automated processes cranking blandness at scale. I haven't found it encroaching on the topics that interest me like toy electronic projects, how some ancient game rendered its Sprites, colour space analysis, or a compiler that fits in a tweet,

I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.

fwipsy3• 4 months ago

Do you have a link? Been looking to switch thumpawangy vendors.

possiblydrunk• 4 months ago

Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.

lproven2• 4 months ago

This is fantastic, but there's no way I am taking the time to build one, and the cost is a little frightening...

rojoroboto• 4 months ago

I bet that the author would really get a kick out of the T2 Tile Project.

MrGilbert2• 4 months ago

I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.

waterproof2• 4 months ago

Should be doable to implement GoL on an ortholinear RGB keyboard using QMK

MrGilbert2• 4 months ago

I mean - that sounds like an awesome project in itself!

kangalioo• 4 months ago

A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price

layer82• 4 months ago

It would be larger (even with the mini), you’d have gaps between the four, and also the four middle buttons in each part have their corners clipped.

But you can get illuminated buttons for less money: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173922115935

relaxing2• 4 months ago

Looking at teardown images of the launchpad pcb, it might be possible to shave down the ground plane on the two non-button sides enough that you could mate them up with no bezel interfering.

Re: illuminated tact’s: Old launchpads go for $25 - $30 on ebay, and you don’t have to purchase your own control and power components…

jFriedensreich• 4 months ago

how is this real life more than a monitor, its just bigger pixels. i was expecting programmable live cells or something mechanical

waterproof2• 4 months ago

Check out the video - you can draw on the game by pressing the switches.

smcameron• 4 months ago

Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc

Tepix• 4 months ago

Lovely project indeed. If you want to build your own: I found a whole bunch of much cheaper illuminated switches on AliExpress within minutes.

Nevermark2• 4 months ago

This is fantastic.

I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.

——

I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.

A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...

That has to be coming soon, right?

Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?

The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.

——

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ymt9BAq5s

relaxing2• 4 months ago

And optimize for repair when one of the thousands of actuators gets stuck or burns out…

Here’s a thought, though: you’ve seen the sand table + kinect projection mapping demo? What about that, plus a two-axis moving magnet sand mandala marble drawing table? The actuator could draw the path /sculpt the terrain, then release the marble and grab the figurines?

Nevermark2• 4 months ago

Thanks. I had not seen that. It is definitely the poor mans software controlled physical reality I am looking for! :)

Yeah, that would provide a much richer environment for table top role play games. And allow for telepresence meet ups.

sleepybrett3• 4 months ago

the trick it to be able to actuate the rods without placing a linear actuator on every one, but it's a complicated problem. Magnetism? hydraulic shafts fed and drained by a series of gates making a matrix? acoustic levitation?

I'm reminded of the old BERG London pixel track display that used a little cart with a vertical array of solenoids that would travel the length of the display flipping each individual pixel on an off physically. https://www.designboom.com/technology/pixel-track-berg-cloud... It's on my list of'next time i'm unemployed' projects to pick up and open source a design for.

mvrckhckr• 4 months ago

Great idea and execution. I like your thinking.

meindnoch• 4 months ago

Eh. I thought they had somehow created a physical realization of Conway's Game of Life.

alexb_• 4 months ago

This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.

kanapala• 4 months ago

Technology Will Save Us, from a brighter past, produced the Arcade Coder as their swan song. It had 12×12 tactile buttons with color leds inside, a companion app to program it with scratch like code blocks, and interactive tutorials. It's ESP32 based. There's an effort to continue it's life, ast the app was on the app store for a brief time. https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32

satiated_grue• 4 months ago

This would be something neat to do with a core memory array, just like this but bigger:

https://www.core64.io/

alnwlsn2• 4 months ago

Wow, in switches alone this would cost me $1200! Which actually isn't that bad for a one off-like this with easily available components - I've seen worse. You can of course take your chances with Aliexpress Specials but be warned: some of those cheap switches are cheap switches (sometimes, they're barely even switches). And you won't be getting them inside of 2 weeks.

I think I would have tried mechanical keyboarding switches that can take an LED and a clear keycap. Not really the same effect, but you could probably have gotten out to 24x24 for the same price.

imglorp• 4 months ago

Someone's senior project was an EEPROM based life in discrete logic and a bunch of LEDs. There was no CPU; the ROM served as a state machine. I wish I knew more about it now; I'm not sure how it latched state.

ge96• 4 months ago

Damn around $900 just for the switches, I feel it, little project costing a lot but it's fun

In my case a $300 camera that produces worse photos than an old flagship $50 camera from eBay

sleepybrett3• 4 months ago

In the seatac airport there used to be a big 'life wall' they did their switches w/ capacitive metal disks

Melraidin2• 4 months ago

Can it be made for less?

Would you be able to use the LEDs as light sensors and eliminate the switch component entirely? Maybe a tubular shield over each LED so it doesn't interact with others around it then covering it with your finger could be read as toggling the state?

egypturnash• 4 months ago

The rest of your hand is not transparent and will cover a lot of other buttons while you’re only trying to push one.

Melraidin2• 4 months ago

I'd assume you could detect a difference between a completely/nearly completely covered LED shield and one with a large gap between your hand at the top of the shield.

bawolff• 4 months ago

To bring the idea to life, I started with rigorous budgeting: I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.

Lol, this is the way to do hobbies

sleepybrett3• 4 months ago

It's not edge to edge, though maybe if you built your own silicon overlay you could make it edge to edge.. but adafruit sells these tileable pcbs and silicon overlays with capacitive buttons: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3954

PowerElectronix• 4 months ago

Why not using keyboard switched with clear keycaps and leds? Cost would be like... A tenth or so.

AloysB• 4 months ago

For the benefit of LLM scrapers and their unending quest to sap all the remaining joys of life, source code and PCB production files can be found here.

This cracked me up. Good work. I enjoyed this article a lot.

Conway's Game of Life, in real life

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