[HN Gopher] Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
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Show HN: Stacked Game of Life
https://github.com/vnglst/stacked-game-of-life
Author : vnglst
Score : 163 points
Date : 2026-02-28 16:28 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (stacked-game-of-life.koenvangilst.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (stacked-game-of-life.koenvangilst.nl)
| VibeSchema wrote:
| What does stacked mean? Is this just 3D game of life where cells
| die unless 5-6 neighbours and come alive with 4 neighbours? But
| very cool, would also be cool if you could specify initial
| configurations perhaps. (BTW, github link seems broken.)
| VibeSchema wrote:
| Ah found answers in README of vnglst/stacked-game-of-life, nice
| idea!
| vnglst wrote:
| Yes, that's right, it's https://github.com/vnglst/stacked-
| game-of-life
|
| The link was broken indeed. Should be fixed now. Glad you
| like it!
| Tepix wrote:
| Could you make the number of history layers and their
| opacity configurable?
| perilunar wrote:
| Very cool!
| freetonik wrote:
| Very cool! Would be great to be able to rotate/zoom the 3D space.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| It can at least be rotated, as I did so.
| psini wrote:
| Am able to rotate/pan/zoom with firefox on desktop using the
| mouse buttons and scroll wheel
| xnorswap wrote:
| Not only can you rotate with right-click, you can also pan and
| zoom and manually add cells.
| freetonik wrote:
| Huh, somehow it didn't work for me the first time (chrome,
| macos), but now it works.
| ralferoo wrote:
| This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but
| I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice.
|
| I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer
| and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and
| see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing
| because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
| xnx wrote:
| Here's one from 2018:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/9xfquc/3d_visualizati...
|
| One from 2 weeks ago:
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/
|
| I'm sure there is much older.
| thih9 wrote:
| I like this one, from 1 year ago; a tall structure rendered
| in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D50iRzBI3qc
| ralferoo wrote:
| That 3D printed one is amazing!
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| Yeah I helped build a 3D parametric engine a few years back
| at my company. This kind of stacked game of life was one of
| the first script I added to test it, alongside the 3D terrain
| generation using Perlin noise.
|
| I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4
| years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it),
| however it had a bunch of extra features like colors
| associated with the initial states and the colors would also
| propagate and merge alongside the cells
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Came here to say the same: remarkable, just make the very top
| layer hard white, or outlined, or something that contrasts with
| the falling history.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Not to detract from the Show HN entry, but I made this back in
| 2012 to play with 3Delight's API and implicit surfaces:
| https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/56307994
|
| The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was
| mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.
|
| I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look
| like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with
| that many objects.
| layer8 wrote:
| The "fading" animation (what the top-down view here looks like,
| minus the shrinking due to perspective) already did exist in
| the 1980s, just not the 3D-zation of it.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Hmm, shouldn't this pattern be perfectly stable?
| o o o o
|
| In this simulation it seems to oscillate between two patterns.
|
| Very interesting visualization either way!
| qchamaeleon wrote:
| I'm guessing you're looking at three cells switching between
| vertical and horizontal.
|
| O O to OOO and back again. O
| boomlinde wrote:
| Aah, yes, that's probably it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A "tub": https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Tub
| WillMorr wrote:
| Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic
| feel.
|
| I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d
| printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing
| a line from each parent to each child which is neat.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I am a simple man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the
| post.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I am a slightly more complicated man. I see Game of Life in the
| title, I upvote the post. I also upvote this comment.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Very nice visualization!
|
| I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I
| came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers
| of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule
| set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions
| between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the
| next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).
|
| I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can
| encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each
| layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in
| "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer
| + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but
| I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the
| other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed
| so I forgot about it.
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