Conway's Game of Life, in real life

Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc

> I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.

I like the way you think.

A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price

Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.

I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.

I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.

When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.

My Alma matter has a jumbo version of this, in which the game if life is one of several available mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWall

A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.

how is this real life more than a monitor, its just bigger pixels. i was expecting programmable live cells or something mechanical

Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.

I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.

This is fantastic, but there's no way I am taking the time to build one, and the cost is a little frightening...

I bet that the author would really get a kick out of the T2 Tile Project.

Très cool.

A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.

Nice. A friend of mine just picked up a Linnstrument, and I’m very tempted to create a Conway’s Game of Life-based musical visualization for it.

https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument

I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?

I've always wanted something like this board, buttons which can light up (preferably a few colours), to use to make games. Anyone ever found such a board which is hackable / programmable?

I don't want to build this or pay for it, but I really want to mess with it for an hour.

It is beautiful

Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.

Now that would be simulating life witg life.

That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.

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