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Life in life

Life in life

Phillip Bradbury
6 HN recommenders · discussed 2013–2025
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About this video

A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.

Why it appears in the archive

The canonical visual for nested simulation, Turing completeness and self-reference; HN readers call it mind-blowing and reach for it constantly.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

lqet · 2020-10 · strong rec

I remember seeing that video 3 years ago and being blown away. In case someone doesn't already know it, here is Conway's Game of Life simulated in Conway's Game of Life: [VIDEO]

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pierreyoda · 2023-01 · strong rec

This is an excellent link, well known in the "community" around this. To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: [VIDEO] (and that's "just" the Game of Life in the Game of Life). I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment. If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based "hardware", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches as building blocks - while still being able to zoom to the lowest level of cells in the renderer. But it's basically R&D and HPC combined if one wants to offer an interesting alternative to the established libraries. From what I know of upcoming hardware, such a library may have to wait a couple of years and basically target (as in, full buy-in, maybe at the programming language-level, certainly in tooling) the next Apple Silicon-like (or beyond) breakthough in commonly accessible hardware for a nice, "free" performance boost. Maybe GPUs are next?

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avian · 2017-09 · rec

Here's a nice video showing OTCA metapixels in action, implementing Game of Life in Game of Life. [VIDEO] It would be amazing to see this Tetris computer rendered into a video like this.

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Groxx · 2020-04 · rec

2017 post has a much-needed youtube video of the metapixels as the top comment: [VIDEO] I haven't been able to find one for tetris tho

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fishtoaster · 2022-12 · rec

This is amazing! I've seen "life in life" as a video from ages ago[0], but this is just suck a slick implementation of it! [0] [VIDEO]

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zamalek · 2025-02 · rec

It might be argued that one of the dynamic programming (caching) ones would be the best by a reasonable standard. These can be used to simulate absolutely monstrous grids, and is where we see simulated CPUs and whatnot. Here's the game of life running in the game of life: [VIDEO] - that one uses Golly.

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lelf · 2013-09 · reference

Not only that, but it can find lowest common denominator, solve a system of linear equations, and even run the complete RSA algorithm (albeit with a pseudorandom RNG that's deterministic). Or run a game of live's simulation [VIDEO]

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posterboy · 2017-06 · reference

I'd guess that GoL and Cellular Automaton Theory preceded and inspired rule 30 etc. So, maybe the architects implied metarecursion, that GoL metaphorically generated rule 30. GoL is Turing complete. I guess that means there is a starting condition that converges to a rule30 cellular automaton. edit: video of GoL emulated inside a turing machine in GoL [VIDEO] (link replaced)

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