The OTCA Metapixel in Conway's Game of Life (2015)

instructables.com

44 points·dEnigma··5 comments

If you want to see what this OTCA Metapixel can be used for, besides simulating Conway's Game of Life inside Conway's Game of Life, I highly recommending reading:

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

Over four years a number of users from StackOverflow built Tetris using the OTCA Metapixel. To summarise, they built layers of abstraction to move from the Game of Life, to Metapixels, to wires, to logic gates, to a RISC computer. There they developed their own assembly language to write tetris and finally compiled and ran it. In total the world is 2,940,928 x 10,295,296 blocks in size.

Here's an interpreter for that language running Tetris: http://play.starmaninnovations.com/qftasm/#jllHdnBGSP

What the fuck. It's comments like this that make me realize computers are something special.

I would love to see a sophisticated comparison to biology and the layers of abstraction there.

Or from strings to particles to elements to people who build computer then program them :)

Mindblowing. That's some serious full stack engineering right there. You give some people a few sets of rules and they find a way to build computers. No wonder we've built computers with the few rules physics gives us ^^

Nice covering of a certain well-known GoL pattern.

If you like GoL, you should check out LifeWiki which is the largest and most up-to-date pattern collection (kind-of encyclopedia for the GoL universe) out there:

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page

If you are interested in latest research and news about the subject, the following blog aggregate is the best I'm aware of:

http://www.conwaylife.com/

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