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Frame from epic conway's game of life Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

epic conway's game of life

Rational Animations
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Cited on HN 4 times, 2016–2024, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters use it as an illustration of how simple rules can produce surprisingly complex behavior.

An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.

“The rules are simple, and on the face value, doesn't create anything exciting, but then we have this” (HN, 2020)

4 citations · Demos

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@trevyn Jul 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Wireworld
I cannot view things like this and [link] and [this video] without coming to the conclusion that we, and life, are just massively complex self-replicating patterns. May you find peace in the oscillations.
Complex patterns as analogy for life
@wintorez Oct 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Metal Spheres Swarm Together to Create Freeform Modular Robots
I was on the same opinion as well. But I would like to borrow form Conway's Game of Life. The initial rules are simple, and to the untrained person, it just creates random blobs that disappear after a while. But then we have things like this: [this video]
Simple rules producing complex structures
@Kim_Bruning Jan 2024 Cites it
on HN thread "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
There's an entire field of deterministic mathematics called Chaos Theory, that pretty much encompasses what it says on the tin. It turns out that -innocent, simple looking- finite state deterministic automata can actually be less predictable than the non-deterministic kind. (and it can get pretty wild! [this video] )
Example of wild behavior from simple deterministic automata

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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