yay! i remember now! but this isn't exactly when i discovered CGoL--rather when i discovered the conwaylife.com website.get_Snacked wrote: December 17th, 2023, 12:23 pm isn't it just the saddest thing when you don't remember?
in 6th grade i was abusing the fact that you can integrate "javascript:" into Chrome URLs to basically do anything on your school chromebook. i was doing this with a friend of mine in my geography class; then, i remembered something programming-related from a long, long time ago that i thought would be cool if i showed my friend. so i searched up "conway's game of life", and although he seemed to know about it and its corresponding Google easter egg, i didn't know that there was any easter egg, so i played with it for a bit.
when it was the end of the geography class, i moved to my next class, which had many more better friends of mine. to one of them, i remember calling the still lifes "houses" and the cells "people", which was a pretty educated guess for nomenclature, given how dumb it is today
. (sadly, i don't think i stumbled upon a glider.) after messing around with the easter egg, i stopped using it and tried to click on playgameoflife.com; however, the website was blocked. so i waited until i came back home to try out the website.when i got home, after i showered, the first thing i did was try out playgameoflife.com because i didn't have any homework to do. fun fact: i accidentally stumbled upon a predecessor of octagon 2 while making random scribbles, as well as a pulsar predecessor. anyways, i went and looked at the "dictionary" the website had and clicked on some patterns to see how they evolved, such as the first one, 101. but i thought it would be more complete and easier to navigate if i had looked at its source, called the Life Lexicon.
i'm pretty sure the Life Lexicon they used actually had a URL of "lifelexicon.com" or "playgameoflife.com/lifelexicon", which delayed me from making progress on finding this website. after a few days of using playgameoflife.com over and over, i decided to actually scroll down on the search page and look for more. and that second result was... conwaylife.com.
