Phillip Bradbury
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2013–2025
1:30 · 4.1M views · May 13, 2012
A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.
The canonical visual for nested simulation, Turing completeness and self-reference; HN readers call it mind-blowing and reach for it constantly.
20 comments from Hacker News
This is an excellent link, well known in the "community" around this. To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: this video (and that's "just" the Game of Life in the Game of Life). I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment. If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based "hardware", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches as building blocks - while still being able to zoom to the lowest level of cells in the renderer. But it's basically R&D and HPC combined if one wants to offer an interesting alternative to the established libraries. From what I know of upcoming hardware, such a library may have to wait a couple of years and basically target (as in, full buy-in, maybe at the programming language-level, certainly in tooling) the next Apple Silicon-like (or beyond) breakthough in commonly accessible hardware for a nice, "free" performance boost. Maybe GPUs are next?
I remember seeing that video 3 years ago and being blown away. In case someone doesn't already know it, here is Conway's Game of Life simulated in Conway's Game of Life: this video
It might be argued that one of the dynamic programming (caching) ones would be the best by a reasonable standard. These can be used to simulate absolutely monstrous grids, and is where we see simulated CPUs and whatnot. Here's the game of life running in the game of life: this video - that one uses Golly.
Here's a nice video showing OTCA metapixels in action, implementing Game of Life in Game of Life. this video It would be amazing to see this Tetris computer rendered into a video like this.
This is amazing! I've seen "life in life" as a video from ages ago[0], but this is just suck a slick implementation of it! [0] this video