I started out in automation:
Cellular automata is where my roots lie:
I made sandbox sand simulations using cellular automata. I made tons of engines and experiments and languages that helped me to do it. I made tons of videos about it too. Automation (cellular) was my home.
Like the great Game of Life by John Conway, even though he hated being known for it. I was making cellular automata just like him. I was getting the computer to automatically apply rules upon cells repeatedly again and again, right?
Except NO! John Conway did not automate the Game of Life when he created it. They didn’t have computers to run it back then. Instead, it was a game they invented for fun during coffee breaks. They drew a grid of lines on some paper during a coffee break. Then they put down nuts onto the various cells created by those lines on that piece of paper during that coffee break. They used nuts because that’s what they were often eating as a snack during a coffee break. (Though I sometimes wonder if it often actually happened at the pub over a pint and John Conway just says “coffee break” instead when he recounts the story so that they don’t sound like a bunch of alkies).
Anyway, they put a nut down onto any cell that was “alive” and left all the dead ones empty. Then they all processed the game rules together, figuring out what the next state of the world should be, using their minds, talking about it, no automation involved at all: Manually moving, removing and adding nuts to create the next “frame” of the game. This was a fully unautomated automata. The automation was hand-done (literally!).
It was a puzzle to do during your time off work, you know, like a Sudoku or a Crossword. And like those things, it was a game you could play with your friends. You worked as a team, figuring out what the next step of the pattern would be. It was a very generative unautomatic game: It was interesting seeing + discovering what emerged from simple starting states. You could trade interesting patterns that you had discovered: Bring one along and play it out together.
John Conway said that Game of Life was a zero player game, but I disagree. Okay well I don’t entirely disagree but it’s not the whole story … okay … When Conway said “zero player game”, what he meant was: The game plays itself. Once it has started, the conclusion is fixed. You can’t change anything after the beginning. But in reality this isn’t true (when you actually play the game like they did back then): There’s a lot of fun to be had by carrying out the algorithm by hand as a group. There’s of course the drama + tension of trying (and often failing) to follow the rules with no mistakes: It’s hard but not too hard. And then of course, there’s plenty of playfulness that you can introduce: In one video, John Conway “kills” a living cell by eating it with a smirk on his face. When he starts to run out of nuts from eating too many 👀 he starts splitting them in too. As all young children know, it’s fun to play with your food (and a little bit naughty).
I also believe that there’s a bigger game that happens between “runs” / “turns”. It’s your job to find an interesting starting state, and to try to understand the simulation, and to try to name the different phenomena that happen in it. They discovered things like the “glider”, named that way because it appeared to glide across the game world. Of course, John Conway had to imagine what a glider actually looked like when animated, as he was stuck doing it all by hand back then. Many years later, when he finally saw it moving at a reasonable speed, he realised it moved less like a glider and more like an ant. He regretted his name choice: He got it wrong! That’s okay though. It’s just a game.
And the even bigger game… was making the game itself. The final Game of Life™️ that we now know and love was only the last in a long chain of iterations made by John Conway and his “coffee break” 👀 pals. They went through countless versions of different rules and stuff, until they got to the set they thought worked the best. It was a conversation & exploration that lasted more than several months: It was highly collaborative, even if Conway got attributed with it (reluctantly) in the end.
So yes!
Game of Life, the world’s most famous zero-player-game… was actually multiplayer. Game of Life, the world’s most famous cellular automata… wasn’t even automated.
Fast forward to the present. Game of Life is one of the more popular beginner creative coding programs to make. It used to be a classic interview question / puzzle, but nowadays LLM agents can poop it out for breakfast.
Sometimes people send me examples of Game of Life examples from out in the wild, like..
“Hey Lu check out this Game of Life someone made it runs really fast”
“Hey Lu check out this Game of Life someone made by prompting ChatGPT” (back in 2022 or something)
“Hey Lu check out this Game of Life i added to my personal website by asking Claude”
“Hey Lu check out this Game of Life i put on my [device]”
Listen, I don’t give a [—] about your [—] Game of Life clone. You don’t know or appreciate the history of this thing. You create this.. this lifeless imitation of a story you don’t understand by ripping out its mouth and lungs. You want the blood but not the heart. You want to wash yourself with it because you see it and think “art”. You’ve emptied it out. You need to search yourself for something that really— oh berd— you need to make something new