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Show HN: Stacked Game of Life(stacked-game-of-life.koenvangilst.nl)
99 points by vnglst 4 days ago | 21 comments
vanderZwan 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Very nice visualization!

I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).

I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.

ralferoo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice.

I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.

xnx 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here's one from 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/9xfquc/3d_visualizati...

One from 2 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/

I'm sure there is much older.

thih9 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I like this one, from 1 year ago; a tall structure rendered in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D50iRzBI3qc

ralferoo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That 3D printed one is amazing!

JKCalhoun 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Came here to say the same: remarkable, just make the very top layer hard white, or outlined, or something that contrasts with the falling history.

WillMorr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic feel.

I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat.

boomlinde 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm, shouldn't this pattern be perfectly stable?

     o
    o o
     o
In this simulation it seems to oscillate between two patterns.

Very interesting visualization either way!

JKCalhoun 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

A "tub": https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Tub

qchamaeleon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm guessing you're looking at three cells switching between vertical and horizontal.

O O to OOO and back again. O

VibeSchema 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What does stacked mean? Is this just 3D game of life where cells die unless 5-6 neighbours and come alive with 4 neighbours? But very cool, would also be cool if you could specify initial configurations perhaps. (BTW, github link seems broken.)

VibeSchema 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ah found answers in README of vnglst/stacked-game-of-life, nice idea!

vnglst 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, that's right, it's https://github.com/vnglst/stacked-game-of-life

The link was broken indeed. Should be fixed now. Glad you like it!

Tepix 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Could you make the number of history layers and their opacity configurable?

huhtenberg 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am a simple man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post.

freetonik 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool! Would be great to be able to rotate/zoom the 3D space.

xnorswap an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Not only can you rotate with right-click, you can also pan and zoom and manually add cells.

freetonik 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

Huh, somehow it didn't work for me the first time (chrome, macos), but now it works.

psini 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Am able to rotate/pan/zoom with firefox on desktop using the mouse buttons and scroll wheel

Schlagbohrer 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It can at least be rotated, as I did so.

perilunar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very cool!