AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an Accidental Expert on Conway's Game of Life

• game-of-life-book

  10 30 0.0 TeX

  A textbook for Conway's Game of Life.

I drifted into the Conway's Life research community in 2001 when I won a small cash prize for a lucky discovery of something called a "boojum reflector". My involvement has gradually snowballed since then. Off and on I've helped maintain various Life-related mailing lists and blogs, the Life Lexicon, and more recently the conwaylife.com forums and LifeWiki.

Another thing I stumbled into was helping Nathaniel Johnson complete an improbably thorough 480-page Conway's Life textbook, with end-of-chapter exercises and everything. The book could be used to teach a college-level class on the subject. https://conwaylife.com/book/ has a free PDF download for the book.

So... I'm not the cleverest Lifenthusiast by a long shot, but for a random question about the Game of Life, I'm more likely to know something about it than at least 99.9999% of the world's population. Ask me anything!

• GOL

  1 0 - JavaScript

  Game Of Life (by JoshuaMichaelHanson)

Thank you for the link to the book. I have always been interested in how to make the starting shapes. I am going to study the book more but started to realize that there are re-usable shapes that can be used to make more complex shapes (early, still, oscillators, gliders, etc..). This seems to be what I was looking for with the starting x/y and then the rule combo and pattern.

I was also thinking there must be a better way than knowing exactly how big the board is vs an infinite board. Also making the edges either always dead or alive VS letting the shapes pass through like pac-man.

Here is my horrible implementation using HTML canvas, JS/JQuery.

https://github.com/JoshuaMichaelHanson/GOL/blob/master/js/go...

Yes, I also made a new green account so as to not dox myself with my other accounts.

• SurveyJS

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• ARC

  18 2,091 0.0 JavaScript

  The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus

It's great for generating synthetic data for training LLMs for solving Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC) by François Chollet. Game of life helps the LLMs with a 2D understanding of the world.

https://github.com/fchollet/ARC

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