Recursive Game of Life

The author says: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shr_id&#x2F;status&#x2F;1602691898162184192" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shr_id&#x2F;status&#x2F;1602691898162184192</a>)<p><pre><code> In the beginning I didn&#x27;t think it was possible without cheating something but finally found a way to &quot;build everything perfectly&quot; Due to the inifinite recursion, each level is aperiodic for both space and time, and you&#x27;ll never see the same pattern no matter how much you scroll</code></pre>

At a certain draw distance (probably&#x2F;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.<p>Neat, even when you know the trick.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conwaylife.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OTCA_metapixel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conwaylife.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OTCA_metapixel</a>

Wow! At the speed of around 0.15 you can see all the relevant computations: Every few seconds three glider triples get sent out, obviously directly representing the 9 neighboring cells. These interact with some lane shifting and 90 degree reflections. In the process these &quot;byte&quot; may lose a glider or two, representing the result of the game of life computation. Then you can see a fuse burn down, then a single glider makes a round and suddenly the whole cell switches state by an army of gliders gently touching the producing border.

Who else had this experience.<p>Cool - Game Of Life on my phone. Some pretty cool patterns. Recursion? Don&#x27;t see it. But look - I can zoom out. Wow, that&#x27;s a pretty large pattern. Oh shit!<p>I&#x27;ve not delved into the code. But I am assuming that this is a static model and not actually doing the GOL calculations. Is that correct?

First off, this is one of the coolest things I&#x27;ve ever seen.<p>Second, judging from the author&#x27;s github [0], I&#x27;m guessing this was made in Haxe [1], which is a language often used to make games. I&#x27;d looked at Haxe before, but I hadn&#x27;t realized that it has a lot of Ocaml-like features. I think I need to give it a try on my next prototype project!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saharan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saharan</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haxe.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haxe.org&#x2F;</a>

I LOVE how you can set it to scroll forever by itself. This website is a true work of art.

I can wrap my head around zooming in - conceptually you run any life simulation you want, i.e. a base level game of life, and then recursively decompose each cell into the 2²² cells of a OTCA metapixel.<p>Zooming out I find much harder to make sense of. What does it look like if you zoom out infinitely often? Is there some limit? If you take an empty universe with all cells dead there seems to be nothing at first, but at closer inspection there is of course still a lot of stuff going on in all the dead metapixels making up the empty universe. After zooming in a couple of times it would be hard to tell that zooming out a bit would leave you with an empty universe. And it would not have to be an empty universe, it could be anything.

Rarely do I look at a website in amazement and ask &quot;How?&quot;. This is awesome.

I&#x27;m never going to stare at TV static and see deeper meaning in random noise, and while this is almost the opposite of that, I&#x27;m surprised by how I felt watching this.<p>Awe and mild discomfort aren&#x27;t the usual feelings I get watching information being processed.

Very smooth. Wonder if there are any optimizations like Hashlife going on? There’s a lot of spatial redundancy to exploit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hashlife" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hashlife</a>

While an interesting effect, this recursive nature of this game can not be seen unless one has a mouse scroll wheel. I think it would be good to allow zoom in&#x2F;zoom out to be done a different way (such as page up&#x2F;page down or +&#x2F;-). Not everyone has a mouse scroll wheel.

This is amazing! I&#x27;ve seen &quot;life in life&quot; as a video from ages ago[0], but this is just suck a slick implementation of it!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8</a>

It isn’t often I verbally exclaim on opening an HN link. Wow.

It looks quite different on mobile here (both Chrome and Firefox) than on desktop. It&#x27;s way better on desktop, on mobile quite chaotic and doesn&#x27;t seem to follow the actual Game of Life rules.<p>Really cool on desktop here!

Doesn&#x27;t work in Firefox<p>Uncaught Object { message: &quot;assertion error&quot;, stack: &quot;C@<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:31:459\nze@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:31:383\nC.g@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:85:493\nne.prototype.h@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:37:66\nZb.prototype.bb&#x2F;&lt;@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:60:197\nu.g&#x2F;g.Ja.onload@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:225:160\nEventHandlerNonNull*u.g@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:225:166\nZb.prototype.bb@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:60:122\nNc.prototype.ba@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:58:500\nZb.prototype.ba@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:59:428\nZb@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:33:71\nZb.h@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:72:373\n@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:243:4\n@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:243:9\n&quot;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works&#x2F;life&#x2F;main.js:31:459\nze@https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.i...</a>, g: {…}, value: &quot;assertion error&quot; } main.js:37:66

I guessed almost immediately how this is implemented, but I&#x27;m still amazed by how fast it is.

This is awesome. How would one describe this formal system? There are no cells essentially

You can&#x27;t fool me! It&#x27;s Life all the way down!

That is so cool! This person really is a freak, in good way. They also created their own physics engine, which was featured here a while ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saharan&#x2F;OimoPhysics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saharan&#x2F;OimoPhysics</a><p>But it would be cool if we could change the GoL parameters and see how that affects the infinite fractal recursion!

Wow, this is something I never considered... go down the rabbit hole on this site (&quot;guns&quot;, &quot;glider guns&quot;, etc). I had no idea people actually tried to &quot;game&quot; or discover useful patterns in game of life:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conwaylife.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OTCA_metapixel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conwaylife.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OTCA_metapixel</a>

“It was the right day to micro dose”, Christopher Robin said to himself.

If you zoom in, you get lower and lower level OTCA metapixels forever, very straightforward.<p>But if you zoom out, at any time it could be possible for them to compute a different pattern. But it&#x27;s OTCA metapixel all the way up. What is being computed, other than more OTCA metapixels? What is being computed after infinite zoom out steps?<p>Makes me question the meaning of existence!

OK, this is mind-blowing

haha getting the speed right at the different levels and everything, nice

My God, it&#x27;s full of pixels!

Super well done! The transition between levels is beautiful.

I am enjoying this. Is there a way to pause? I have to verify each cell just to boggle my mind at the fact that everything is adhering to GOL rules.

It is interesting to observe that the perception of time changes with zooming in&#x2F;out. I know the actual speed of the gliders remains the same, but it seems to my eye that they speed up if you zoom out and slow down if you zoom in.<p>I wonder if this perception has an analogue in the physical world that has relativity as a consequence.

This is really great. I would like to use it as a visual backdrop on a big screen when playing DJ sets. I see that it enters a permanently zooming out mode when I zoom out fast, would be awesome if the zoom control disappears when it enters that mode so that it just displays the game of life itself and no UI elements.

Nice zoom out, it feels like the Universe is constructed a bit like this

i can&#x27;t possibly be the only one who didn&#x27;t get what this is

Mesmerizing, I am interested for the code and how is this built. When I said build the entire fractal concept is it emergent or deliberate? Who did author envisioned this&gt;

I wonder what the smallest molecules&#x2F;things are that could be used to make a real game of life? Could you do it with bacteria? Surely not viruses or amino acids?

This is the coolest thing I&#x27;ve seen in a long time!

Mesmerising! And so fast!<p>@JWZ, can we have a xscreensaver for this please!

Incredible. There&#x27;s more here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oimo.io&#x2F;works</a>

This person&#x27;s entire website is beautiful.

No matter what speed&#x2F;zoom I set it to, it skips steps like crazy and no simulation can be seen.

well this guy makes me feel stupid, tbh.

also duplicated at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33971341" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33971341</a><p>There must be a trick to it, but some of it has to be real... and it&#x27;s so smoothly done I can&#x27;t easily see the transition.

It wasn&#x27;t immediately obvious to me: you need to scroll to see the recursive aspect.<p>(This is really amazing)

I had a sudden dawning zooming out that really felt like a psychedelic &quot;insight&quot;.

How is this even possible?

Amazingly performant. Runs on old hardware very smoothly.

This should be an option for a screensaver. Well made!

amazing, both visually and conceptually.

Has anyone tried this in a 3D cell distribution instead of 2D arrangement of cells with similar rules?<p>Does it simulate life or universe at any scale?

OOOohhh, you have to scroll!

Neat

Loading...

It should be oiomo.io

That is beautiful

this is what the internet is all about thx :)

Beautiful

How?

WOW

Trippy.

beautiful

neat