Giant Game of Life

In the previous post, I showed a little game of life implemented as WebGL fragment shader. To demonstrate the efficiency of this implementation, here’s a 1024x1024 grid running at high speed. The world is initialized randomly with 50% alive cells.

After loading the page, you see that most cells quickly die, leaving dead trash in their wake. Little bubbly pockets of activity continue for a couple of minutes. Every time I’ve ran it, the activity eventually dies (with some small two-state things which flip between states very quickly).

I have yet to see any interesting “guns” or advanced structures appear. I suppose they are quite rare, or require different starting conditions (e.g. interesting structures can’t survive with this much litter in the environment).

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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Tagged #programming, #graphics, #webgl. All content copyright James Fisher 2017. This post is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.