how and when you discovered the game of life?

[Hdjensofjfnen]

Let's see... a friend introduced me to it at age 10, and I became so hooked my teacher literally had to ask me to stop hijacking the school computers to run Golly.

[Moosey]

I became interested because I found bitstorm.org, though I had already come across CGoL earlier; I just didn't know that anything very interesting existed, nor did I know how much it's been studied.

[JP21]

You don't need to read this. Just posting because of my freedom.

Read it slowly and carefully because I read it fast and I didn't understand what I said.
(and reading half of it, is how I discovered life, and the other half is about what I did to become better at life.)

3 years ago, I first encountered the game of life on youtube because of the video about google easter eggs but I only searched for it just to see the google secret then I continued with the video. 3 years later (4-6 months ago), I found a video but it is a different one (about secrets of youtube) and then I remember searching the game of life and then this time, I investigated it and thought it was not much then I go to wikipedia and learned about patterns, then I went to https://bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ and start checking some patterns in that website, then I wanted to have a collection of still lives (using screenshots to save patterns) and I wanted a mobile app of the game of life then I used that for some days, then I found better application and I found an amazing wiki then I was amazed of how much I don't know about life because there was many patterns in lifewiki, so everyday I try learning more and more, then 4-6 months later, I know so much that I want to say something then I went to forums blah blah blah and that's how I discovered so much about it.
Edit: I think it was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faF4DlKUOms

[lk050807]

I discovered life at ten from a youtuber named "da lou li lal su sai" or "Big old Li talk about math" and rediscovered it at 13.
Than I am play around with playgameoflife.com for ten weeks or so, than I found a url linked to golly and I play
with golly for 16 weeks and found a url to conwaylife.com...

[bluemanofgrapes]

I started with gameoflife.com around 2017, then transitioned to Lifeviewer in early 2018, then to Lifewiki in late 2018, I first saw the forums a few days later, a few years later and now here we are!

[hotcrystal0]

I found Conway’s Game Of Life at around 2018-2019, through these videos. After that, I just searched it up and then I found bitstorm.org. In 2019-2020, I found the forums and Golly, but didn’t create an account until July 2020.

[haaaaaands]

through a bunch of redirects in wikipedia, 6 years ago

[Zodduniverse]

Through the google easter egg 1-2 years ago

[haaaaaands]

Through the google easter egg 1-2 years ago

what easter egg?

[unname4798]

Through the google easter egg 1-2 years ago

what easter egg?

By entering "Conway's Game Of Life".

[haaaaaands]

nice

[TYCF]

Through the google easter egg 1-2 years ago

I rediscovered the Conway's game of life in the same way (I first discovered it in wikipedia).

[haaaaaands]

ok, just asked my best friend, he found it last month that a book that came with his puzzles had a math section and it mentioned somewhere cellular automata and the example it gave was life and it included some patterns like a pentadecathlon and a block and a glider and a fun fact about a methuselah and he liked it so installed golly on his 2009 desktop and then i showed him some stuff about other rules.
he's a nice guy who likes messing around in apgsearch (and crashing his pc with gliders). shame he doesn't know about this site.
edit: i once crashed mine with gliders too. ok just don't ask how many gliders the patterns made.

[otismo]

In 1998 I was in the third phase of my financial career.
First, stockbroker; second, money manager; third,
third market. I knew how to use computers in my work,
but still, at age 45, I had never owned one. I knew about
them, I traded tech stocks; but I lived thru the era of the
development of the spreadsheet; I had no idea of how
powerful it was, or its impact on things.
The boss decided to get into the bond biz, and got
a Bloomberg for the bond guys. This is also a dream
machine for guys like me. Michael Bloomberg had
just decided to get out of the proprietary hardware biz,
and port all the bloomberg (machine) functionality to
the PC platform (all clients and potential customers
already had their own PC infrastructure, so he was
just making integration easier).
I begged the boss for time on the machine.
He said, "When those two guys are gone...NO, when
they have LEFT THE BUILDING - it's all yours".
I was in Heaven. But then I had to learn the PC.
My girlfriend, whose last name was Greene, had an
ancient PC-XT Clone she got from her brother in
Madison, Wisconsin. I was at her place, and she asked
me to take it down to the dumpster and throw it out.
I said, "Why don't we give it to some kid?"
It had a monochrome monitor (orange/gold),
a dot-matrix printer, and a keyboard. 20 Mb hard drive,
8088 CPU, 2 5.25" floppy disk drives, lotsa expansion
slots, a tiny bit of RAM, etc. Also quite a few floppies.
She let me put it all in the trunk of her car, and we
dropped by a friend's place; offered the system to
their highly intelligent young son; but he was not
interested. Too old.
So this machine became MY first computer, as I had
decided to begin assimilating the learning curve
( I still am ). On it was this goofy little program -
I couldn't figure out what the heck it was -
something about this Conway's Game of Life...
Soon I had a donated IBM PS2 286 CPU;
a donated bulletin board system unit with half
a GIG hard drive, and a 386 CPU.
I soon ran into Mirek's Cellebration, Johan Bontes'
Life32, George Maydwell's Collideoscope...
I was into oscillator art...
First website "My Life Pages"
@ angelfire.com/linux/lifepages
http://www.angelfire.com/linux/lifepages

[get_Snacked]

isn't it just the saddest thing when you don't remember?

[haaaaaands]

D:

[tommyaweosme]

i watched some youtube video mentioning it, downloaded an inferior google play app, messed around a bit, and a few years later i found my way onto here.

[pifricted]

I don’t remember how I know the game of life.
But last year,I’m interested in it suddenly.

[b-engine]

Back in 2020, I'm playing Turbowarp then I saw this, which was my primary site of playing GoL patterns.
In sometime between 2021 and 2022, I visited https://playgameoflife.com. This is my primary GoL program afterwards.
In 2023, I get used into conwaylife.com, which I knew LifeWiki and later the forums.
In September 2023, I registered into the forums as 0-engine cordership, later renamed to b-engine a month later.

[tommyaweosme]

Let's see... a friend introduced me to it at age 10, and I became so hooked my teacher literally had to ask me to stop hijacking the school computers to run Golly.

use conwaylife.com. it can run hexagonal rules better, most schools are ok with it, and it has lifeviewer.

wait why am i suggesting a site to its own users???

[haaaaaands]

Let's see... a friend introduced me to it at age 10, and I became so hooked my teacher literally had to ask me to stop hijacking the school computers to run Golly.

use conwaylife.com. it can run hexagonal rules better, most schools are ok with it, and it has lifeviewer.

wait why am i suggesting a site to its own users???

this is going straight into famous quotes

[iddi01]

My story is very unusual:

(about 10 years ago) I'm a big fan of screensavers since about 3, and one of my favorite screensavers is "CloudLife", which generates cloud-like patterns using CGoL.

(about 6 years ago) I didn't know what exactly caused the screensaver's behavior until i found a really simple CGoL-simulating program on Y8, which attracted me for a long time, but then my interest faded.

(about 3 years ago) Later, i rediscovered that program and played around for a while just before i left Y8 due to it being dominated by silly HTML5 games. I become very clear about CloudLife being a form of CGoL and i even made a video showing the evolution of various small patterns. I never published it though.

(about 9 months ago) Recently, after watching some CloudLife, i had an idea and wrote a simple Python program to simulate CGoL. It's so simple that the cells have to be "drawn" from Shell. I played around with large random soups and other large systematic patterns.

(about 7 months ago) One day, i suddenly thought there must exist a website dedicated to CGoL. Instead of using Google, etc., I typed in addresses that i think might host the theoretical website. I tried gameoflife.org/net/com, with the last one being a website to document the game we're in... The fourth address i tried is conwaylife.com, and it surprisingly works! I instantly got 100x as much knowledge about CGoL as before, but i also found that OCA exists.

(6 months ago) I installed Golly, it took a while for me to get used to the high speed. I ultimately started trying strobing rules, and i discovered a rule with unique dynamics, B0123456/S5, which got me so excited that i went and created an account here to post the rule.

As you can see, i'm naturally interested in CGoL even when very young, it seems that anyone like me has to ultimately discover this website.

[b-engine]

Adding more informations:
In the "Turbowarp era" I didn't know about RLE and how to save patterns, even if it's possible on the program…no, it's project. I still don't knew about that until I get into the forums. The project supports OCA, but I don't know any of them other than those listed on.
When I get used into playgameoflife, I don't like to use LifeViewer, due to "harder" controls, and never used it until I discovered it's "darker" side.

[TigerCub414]

I first discovered the Game of Life in 2018. I got a book called The Second Law by P.W.Atkins, I didn't read it much but it briefly mentioned cellular automata to illustrate thermodynamics. I first played with CGOL on the website michurin.net, which is basic life emulator that came with a collection of oscillators and spaceships. Then, I forgot about life for several years. Then, in 2022, I decided to look up the Game of Life and found conwaylife.com; I was surprised by all the crazy patterns that I had no idea about. I lurked on the forums a lot but didn't join them until 2024.

[islptng]

When I learned C++ for about 1 year (about 2021), I bought a book about it.
In the book, there is a program, called "Cell fun.cpp", which, simulates CGoL.
Because the maximum of the grid is 20x20 (and toroidal is not supported), I just left it.
In 2022, I saw a video on Bilibili that says, "...there are moving objects..."
(at that time I did not know the existence of glider), so I started to use that bad program again.
Then I searched for Game of Life in Baidu, and finally get Golly.
========
on Baidu Tieba, I saw a lot of interesting patterns. I wrote a lot of .rule for wiring(and is planning to make a computer).
Then when I was reading This page, I saw "Izhora".
I searched for "Izhora", and Bing gave me this wiki link: Izhora. I clicked on the 1st reference, and found this.
Three months later, I registered an account. ConwayLife Forums, Here I am!