I think "quite interesting" is an understatement. This is the Game Of Life simulating the Game Of Life. I personally consider it to be one of the Great Wonders of software.

You know one of the hard questions here must be, what configuration exactly is it simulating? It has to be a configuration that simulates the same Game of Life at a higher scale. Any change you make to the configuration must also change the higher level configuration that it simulates.

And it occurs to me, a blank sheet of paper qualifies as the Game Of Life simulating the Game Of Life.

What makes GoL in GoL somewhat magical feeling is less "there are layers of logic being executed" and more "GoL rules and conditions are extremely restrictive yet still just complex enough to simulate nested execution of the ruleset itself". When you move up the complexity chain to "person with a sheet of paper" you lose some of that wonder to just end up with "extremely complex system can throw away most of the complexity to also simulate execution of a simple system" which feels a lot less surprising.

You might like this puzzle.

https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/21

It really makes you think about this; interaction between levels in a simulation.

If you think about it, that's basically what's going on if someone does a quantum mechanics simulation.

Now that you say it like that...

What are other Great Wonders of software?

1. Game of life simulating itself 2. Lisp interpreter (in C? or in Lisp) 3. a game engine?? 4. Bitcoin 5. Other distributed systems?? (Spanner?) 6. AI/deep learning representative. GPT4? AlphaGo? Pikadditions? 7. ?

- Error correcting codes (viterbi, reed/Solomon, ...)

- cryptography in general

- data compression

- a lot of DSP stuff is pretty magical in it's various applications - digital filtering, modulation/demodulation, recovery of weak signals in noisy environments, beam-forming etc

There's a lot of really amazing, largely mathematical, foundation work that we now tend to take for granted and without which we'd be back in the relative dark ages.

Zooming out on that one is an absolutely amazing experience

I made that a slowly panning and enlarging Mac OS screensaver from that site - 10 lines of source I’ve long since lost to load a web view. [edit to make sense]

You can also zoom in

Beautiful. Looks like what I'd see when I would press on my closed eyeballs.

Within 30 seconds, it crashed my 2016 MacBook Pro (maybe overloaded the CPU + the failing battery? It's a feeble machine).

After the Mac's version of the BSD, Mac helpfully restored all of my windows (I have that setting turned off), and there it was again, happily Game Of Lifing in the background. Shut it down just as the fans were spinning up again.

Next time I'm discussing the ol' "are we part of a simulation?" dilemma, I'll pull this up

Also the obligatory link to "I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility" by qntm:

https://qntm.org/responsibilit

The Futurama episode "All the Way Down" and the visual novel Anonymous;Code have the same premise, it's a fun one.

This one is like looking the universe into its soul.

Btw, can the game of life (at least in theory) simulate chaotic systems like a double pendulum?

It's Turing complete, it can simulate anything any other Turing equivalent machine (e.g. a PC) can.

Cellular automata in general can exhibit chaos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30

This is one of the best demos of Game of Life. I guess its just looping, and not all the movements are calculated, since you can zoom out till infinity?

Correct me if I am wrong.

This should be my new screensaver