I’ve always been fascinated by Conway’s Game of Life. The idea that a simple set of rules can be used to create a complex system that has almost infinite variety. One of the first personal projects I can remember working on utilized a modified rule set of the game of life on a 1D array. The idea was that I could map the position of the alive and dead cells to the holes on a flute I had bought. The flute had 5 holes and so I recorded the notes off of all 32 possible permutations of covering and opening the holes. I’d run the simulation and then use the state of the array to play the corresponding notes.

Since the rule set I was using wasn’t all that complicated, most of the time I ended up with a set of repeating notes, or the simulation would end up with all dead cells.

Though I lost the copy of the program I created at that time, I thought it would be nice to experiment with the game of life simulation again and started off creating a simple simulation in unity. I’ve uploaded a webgl build to itch.io for people to play around with if their interested. The simulation starts automatically, you can control the camera zoom using the mouse scroll wheel and the position using the WASD keys. The simulation can also be sped up and slowed down using the keypad + and – keys.