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.
exolab 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
eps 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mittermayr 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
zytek 56 seconds ago [-]
lcamtuf is doing that for decades!
cjfd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
abcd_f 1 hours ago [-]
And who didn't do that! :)
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
mastermedo 2 hours ago [-]
A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.
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.
slow_typist 3 hours ago [-]
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.
f1shy 3 hours ago [-]
I want to do a game like lights out. I'm thinking in 3d printing transparent caps and using dirt chip pcb switches and standard leds. The cost must be also down to 30 cts. Would be like a middle ground.
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
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.
I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?
alex_duf 3 hours ago [-]
Do you mean every pixel or every sub-pixel?
Sub-pixel is interesting because the geometry of the grid isn't going to be the same from one screen to the other. It might also look compressed horizontally.
vscode-rest 3 hours ago [-]
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eps 2 hours ago [-]
Conversely, it'd be cool to play it on an large empty office building.
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?
rmnclmnt 3 hours ago [-]
Novation Launchpad used to be exactly that: you send MIDI CC messages with proper values and you can light up the grid (with different colors).
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
I think "physical" refers to the fact that you initialize the state by pressing physical buttons. That's quite accurate.
fwipsy 4 hours ago [-]
I don't want to build this or pay for it, but I really want to mess with it for an hour.
nsnzjznzbx 43 minutes ago [-]
You need a science museum!
Traubenfuchs 1 hours ago [-]
Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
ordu 31 minutes ago [-]
Well, people can die if they have too many or too little of neighbors, but they can't be summoned from a thin air if they have just enough neighbors. Hard to simulate life with people. Though if you are ready for a simulation step of 20 years or so... But it still may not work, because you need people of two opposing sexes and compatible genders near the empty sell to fill it. In Game of Life all cells are hermaphrodites.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.
mkirsten 2 hours ago [-]
It is beautiful
gethwhunter34 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
shawoodle65 2 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 10:29:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I like the way you think.
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
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.
https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument
One window = one pixel.
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad
Also seems to be in stock locally.
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...
https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.