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.

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xnx 6 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.

	▲	AStrangeMorrow an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah I helped build a 3D parametric engine a few years back at my company. This kind of stacked game of life was one of the first script I added to test it, alongside the 3D terrain generation using Perlin noise. I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells
	▲	thih9 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I like this one, from 1 year ago; a tall structure rendered in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D50iRzBI3qc
	▲	ralferoo 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That 3D printed one is amazing!

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jlarocco 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to detract from the Show HN entry, but I made this back in 2012 to play with 3Delight's API and implicit surfaces: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/56307994

The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.

I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects.

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JKCalhoun 3 hours 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.