Life in life
Channel: Phillip Bradbury
Date: 2012-05-13

A video of Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life.

The Life pattern is the OTCA Metapixel: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel - for more information, see http://otcametapixel.blogspot.com.au/

The life simulator used is Golly - http://golly.sourceforge.net/ which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list).

Inspired by this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw but with the speed and scale varying smoothly over time, rather than in discrete jumps as the original video did.

The actual video is exported from Golly using a custom Python script: https://github.com/mrphlip/life3/tree/main/life2 (since Golly built-in only supports rendering the view with a scale which is a power of 2, for performance reasons - this is not a particularly well-optimised or fast script to run).

The audio track used to be a Shepard Tone, but that was horrible, so I replaced it with some of the music in YouTube's library (Jingle Punks - Back of the Room Hang)... if you really want to hear the original version, it is over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwFvytK5K0