“The Recursive Universe”, Amanda Ghassaei2020-05-01 (; backlinks; similar)⁠:

A few years ago I came across this video, showing a complex machine built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life:

[Zoom-out video of the OTCA Metapixel, showing the metapixels being used to emulate Conway’s Game of Life inside Conway’s Game of Life, as simulated in Golly by Phillip Bradbury in 2012.]

The purpose of the machine is to emulate a single Life pixel. With a big enough matrix of these “metapixels”, you can simulate a meta-version of Life on a massive scale. From there you could create a meta-metapixel out of metapixels and so on… This post is (mostly) some notes I took back in 2015 while trying to understand how this metapixel was designed.

  1. OTCA Metapixel

  2. Clock

  3. Encoding the Rules

  4. Counting Neighbors

  5. Comparing Neighbor Count with Rules

  6. Accessing Neighbor State

  7. Determining the Next State

  8. Output Display

  9. Further Reading

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The Recursive Universe