ConwayLife.com

get_Snacked wrote: December 17th, 2023, 12:23 pm isn't it just the saddest thing when you don't remember?

yay! i remember now! but this isn't exactly when i discovered CGoL--rather when i discovered the conwaylife.com website.

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.

Maybe I was bored and look for “games”, and I found CGoL?

pifricted wrote: July 10th, 2024, 9:54 am In 2023 winter, I knew there is "a wiki for CGoL", and viewed many pages.
In May,2024, I had a account. Then I posted my frist rule.

The first time I learned about CGOL was in 2023, through John Conway’s Wikipedia article. (I think I’ve read about a few years before, but didn’t look further)
The second time I found CGOL was when I was editing Wikipedia in 2024 and found Golly and LifeWiki.
The third time I found CGOL was in 2025, when I was trying to make a game of life simulator and finally decided to make an account for the forums.
And so probably so many other times that I’ve forgotten.

when i'm <8 years old i discovered a video
finding this website is another story though

I saw Michael Stevens of Vsauce mention it, played with it for some years then got into it seriously in 2019 with Golly and this site.

I had (and probably still have) an android game called sand:box which was basically just a particle sandbox with a lot of materials and one of them was "Conway's Game of Life", I once searched it up and found playgameoflife.com, I used it a lot, I even once rediscovered the clock and called it the cogwheel and was disappointed when I saw it already existed, and then I found this website when looking in the life lexicon but though this forum was just an expert community or what I thought of it to be, finally I started lurking on lifewiki and then created an account on both this forum and lifewiki, then I found golly and was part of this community for a while, in 2024 I quit because of personal reasons and boredom, then I joined again in 2025 and here I am.

The powder toy

The Google easter egg, when I was 11.

idk maybe
i only remember watching numberphile videos when i was yonger

jayden678910 wrote: November 10th, 2025, 4:24 pm The powder toy

Me too

I first got truly interested in the Game of Life when I saw this game on Scratch in March 2025.

The earliest I remember hearing about it was from this YouTube video which I'm pretty sure I watched the year it was released, which was 2020. At that time I didn't understand the Game of Life too well so I wasn't interested in it. I was 10, so that's not much of a surprise to me.

Last year, I was watching random videos about evolution simulators unrelated to life. One video (that I cannot pinpoint) mentioned CGoL, and I found this website shortly after and got my account, OCAfan55. Without that one video, there would be dozens less useless posts.

Sam hogan made a 0-player game where tiles can fight with different zoooids. He showed cgol as an example of a 0-player game

B468S02357 wrote: April 5th, 2026, 4:22 pm Sam hogan made a 0-player game where tiles can fight with different zoooids.

Otherwise known as Cell Machine.
This thing accidentally spawned tons of mods and remakes and even a community.