Post AwANYGOF05hHQxXCds by Toble_Miner@chaos.social
 (DIR) More posts by Toble_Miner@chaos.social
 (DIR) Post #AwANY06dXm6mvjAuyu by Toble_Miner@chaos.social
       2025-07-15T18:32:28Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Had the urge to revisit an old project recently. A project so old that I only posted about it on Twitter even!It's a tiny monochrome 8x8 pixel LED matrix measuring in at only 12x12mm.Back when posting about it initially I failed to come up with an interesting animation to show on the matrix itself.I've finally come up with something now:
       
 (DIR) Post #AwANY88LhIEPpM2OlE by Toble_Miner@chaos.social
       2025-07-15T18:44:01Z
       
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       The underlying concept is quite simple really. The matrix is displaying the population of toroidal 64x64 Conway's Game of Life board.The brightness of each LED represents the population (number of cells alive) in an 8x8 area within the board. The resulting animation is quite pleasant, even hypnotizing to look at.
       
 (DIR) Post #AwANYGOF05hHQxXCds by Toble_Miner@chaos.social
       2025-07-15T18:49:11Z
       
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       There are some additional tricks involved to prevent the simulation from always playing out the same or getting stuck in a potentially visually boring loop.Every once in a while a few life cells are injected  in at a pseudo-random position to introduce some entropy.Additionally the number of cells dying and becoming alive is monitored. If there is very little fluctuation in overall population over a few seconds some fresh cells are injected as well to prevent stale patterns from persisting.