Game of Life, stacked

For three months I’ve spent weekends, on and off, building an AI-assisted development workflow engine. To refine it I have to build things with it. This weekend, generative art. I’ve always loved Conway’s Game of Life; the cellular automaton is mesmerising.

The prompt:

/zalwa-bootstrap I want to create a 3d version of game of life in the browser so that I can see each layer that came before it stack on top of each other. I want to be able to control the speed and be able to navigate my perspective. Not sure what to use for the rendering? but I do like TS

Two days, in the gaps between real life, and this came out:

goluniverse.cc plays Conway’s Game of Life, the classic grid where simple rules make dots live, die, and drift. But instead of throwing each frame away when the next arrives, it stacks them. Every generation becomes a flat layer, and the layers pile upward, so you look at the pattern’s history as a solid shape. A glider crawling across the grid becomes a diagonal streak; a blinker, a fluted column; a chaotic mess, a turbulent cloud.

A cell’s colour tracks its age, and no cell lives forever. When one hits its age limit it dies and detonates, throwing fresh life into the cells around it, which keeps the whole thing from settling into vertical stripes.

Only the most recent few hundred layers survive. The bottom fades as the top grows, so the structure hovers at a constant height and extrudes upward forever.

You can fly around it with a mouse or your fingers while it builds, and sliders control the speed, height, lifespan, cell size, and grid size. It’s just a web page: nothing to install, nothing saved, no account, and it all runs on your own phone or laptop.

Have a play at goluniverse.cc. The source is at WrathZA/3dgol.