Conway's Game of Life in real life | Hacker News Reader

Conway's Game of Life in real life

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74 pointssurprisetalk20 comments

Cool! This is about an interactive display but initially I thought someone might have managed to make GOL into a physical automaton! Cells could physically sense neighbouring cell states and change their own states.. might still need a global clock to get coherent GOL behaviour but I think that would be fascinating! Also GOL (2,3/3) is only one out of about 1024 possible 2d totalistic CA rules, some of the others have interesting behaviours too and would be fun to be able to explore in the real world :)

There's probably a way of making these switches for less, if you're willing to trade money for toil and strife. Wind up toys have a very long roll of "wind up spring". 3D print a jig to bend a short piece of that into shape. Use somewhat translucent filament to print the switch. Or use a diffuser/matte thingy from a LCD monitor. I don't know. It'll probably be more expensive in the end but you'll feel good that you did it.

I’ve always wanted to do something similar, but with screen printed capacitive sensors on a pcb with a matching led in each sensor.

Much more scalable in cost.

> The switches are around $3 a piece

$3*17*17 = $867 - ouch!

The remark about a touchscreen amused me, since this is essentially a lo-res touchscreen. You can have a super high resolution full color touchscreen for small moneys, but if you want it to be super low res and monochrome you have to pay big moneys and you also have to design and assemble it yourself! In a way this is obvious, but it's also kind of bananas: you can only easily do things that are popular. Then again I suppose there'd be no project if it was easy.

I can't put my finger on it, but there's something very satisfying about seeing his final build, that I think wouldn't be there if it were a touch screen.

never underestimate physicality over screens. Look at the backlash to 'big ipad' car dashboards.

If it was a touchscreen, then the whole project could just be replaced by googling Conway’s game of life on an iPad. The physicality is the point.

this is a ridiculous price.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/12x12mm-Tactile-Switc...

also comes in 15mm squares, rgb led. $0.30 in sub 1k quantities.

Anyone else expecting (fearing) some sort of Stephen King sci-fi game show? Whew - just light bulbs...

I was imagining slime-mold-based logic cells or something

I was really hoping for mechanical clicking and movement.

Also for a glider gun.

is it possible to read out the state of a flipdot display?

with a small amount of additional memory the display could hold the game state and you could manually flip the dots to input the cells.

used to be a big ol' game of life in the seatac airport in the 80s-90s.

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