It reminds me of people building computers in Minecraft, but for Game of Life they had to go another abstraction level lower and build the basics like wires and transistors out of GoL constructs.

I was actually a tiny bit disappointed - I was hoping for a closer coupling of tetris-logic to life-logic :-) Per https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Universal_computer the first turing-machine-in-Life goes back to 2000, and "building a CPU to run code" is at this point the "obvious" way to do it. See https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2020/intro-to-circuits-... for a tutorial with a (circular) "final goal of designing an Intel 4004 and using it to simulate the game of life."

Thank you for posting this, I never saw this before. This is seriously impressive, and it would make a nice screensaver.

then you will be even more impressed by Rule 110 being turing complete with a specific background pattern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Struggling to wrap my head around how this is possible. Seems others are too [0]. A computer made in, say, minecraft can be given inputs. But since GoL is a zero player game (the player only selects the initial states), how can it possibly compute anything other than the static inputs it's originally provided? Perhaps that's sufficient for Turing Completeness? (when I click 'Run' on the provided link, my chrome tab becomes unresponsive; was hoping to disprove my own disbelief by playing Tetris in GoL but thus far unsuccessful, yet remaining hopeful!).

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/394957/why-can-conway-s-...

[1] https://copy.sh/life/?pattern=TetrisOTCAMP.mc

it turns out it CAN play Doom. That's impressive

The obsession with technical things is a reflection of how divorced we have become with the natural world. As we need to attend less and less to basic needs, the mind turns inwards, and not always for the better.

I see it as a sort of computer programming equivalent of god. It's so fundamental, beautiful in its simplicity and diversity. The people doing this work are like extreme devotees.

I see it as a better Physics - current Physics as we understand it is messy, continuous, unintuitive, and contradictory. Kinda frustrating for computer science folks.

Game of Life on the other hand is so simple it can be written up in a few lines of code, and still can give rise to endless complexity.

Easy to implement, but much room for optimization.

The rules are simple, but give rise to complexity.

Despite conservation of mass and such not being a part of the rules, what appear to us to be "objects" arise, and can even exhibit velocity! Physics-lite results out of nowhere.

Finally, nerds like simulations.

Something to do with the name perhaps!

Game of Death doesn’t sound half as fun ;)