ConwayLife.com

This is a place for users to theorize what might happen to the Conway's Game of Life community if they had never learned of CGoL in the first place. I'd like to see some of the modern-era 'giants' of CGoL like Dave Greene weigh in, perhaps in the future...

Here's an example:
Without Hdjensofjfnen:
1) Branching knightships would have been discovered at most 45 hours later than they were in real life. (Assuming ceteris paribus)
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3468&start=93

2) The Just Friends thread would have been started by someone else.
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2442

3) People wouldn't have to deal with my shitposting at age 12.
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3071&start=13

4) The LifeViewer alias for B34cet/S234jkwyz would be nonexistent or different.

If I had never learned of CGoL:
1. There wouldn't be as many interesting rules on the forums, since Eatsplosion, Whichlife, and pentadecathlife are all interesting in my opinion, though I may be biased.
2. I'd probably be awfully bored
3. Someone else would have posted M18.

If I had never heard of CGoL
1. I would annoy less people (probably)
2. I would waste less time


But onto the good stuff:
1. No one would have optimized apgsearch for profiling (10% + 50% = 60% speed boost)
2. apgsearch would not track megasized soups
3. X3VI wouldn't be #2

If I had never heard of CGoL:
JvN29 replicators would still take millions of ticks to replicate
The slowest 1 cell spaceship in a 3 state rule would be a lot faster
(Probably something else that I've forgotten about)

fluffykitty wrote:If I had never heard of CGoL:
JvN29 replicators would still take millions of ticks to replicate
The slowest 1 cell spaceship in a 3 state rule would be a lot faster
(Probably something else that I've forgotten about)

There wouldn't be as many orthogonoids in some sort of construction-test rules by phpbb12345, and I wouldn't have made ggç, etc.

Moosey wrote: There wouldn't be as many orthogonoids in some sort of construction-test rules by phpbb12345, and I wouldn't have made ggç, etc.

nice 2019 posts

anyway uhhhh

• the wiki would be in a significantly messier state
• some miscellaneous syntheses i guess?
• that's about it really

The turing machines rule B2ac/3i (no, still no better name) would not be discovered, and B2-n/S would take its place.

Time to revive this thread.

If I never heard about CGoL:

• The hotcrystal0 mechanism wouldn't exist. There's a chance someone else might have discovered it later while playing around with honey farms and sparks, but it's not that likely.
• 409P7 wouldn't exist, and there's a small chance P7 middleweight sparker could have been found by someone else (but nobody does such searches anymore), probably using a different mechanism.
• The base mechanism for the P35 glider gun wouldn't have been found. The P35 gun would probably have been found by somebody else, possibly using the same mechanism but also possibly not.
• I made various small reductions to oscillators over the years, however it's likely that those reductions would have been found by other people.

If I never heard about CGoL:

• i will have one less way to pass the time
• the CA roleplay ultimate and the cgol rpg would have one less player

edit:oopsie

If I never heard about CGoL:

• There would not be any Range-2 INT rules or emulators
• FWKS would not have made SoManyShipsR2INT or WanderersFWKS
• Travelling Ts would not have a mainspace LifeWiki page, and I predict the thread would be less active or abandoned
• Interest in Checkerboard-complementary or SCBD rules would be delayed by a long time
• LifeViewer would still have the annoying paste bug

If I never heard about CGOL:

• There will still be no (8,6)c/704 and (135,13)c/1747 spaceships in 5S, and the 20c/1844 will be 1 cell larger

basically just it.

Without GOL, I would never have fully appreciated the concept of "complex behaviour can emerge from simple rules".

I would not have grasped that a universe can fit into a tiny grid (the sheer number of soup configurations on the 16x16 torus is mindbogglingly big as 2^256 is of the order of magnitude as the number of atoms in the observable universe...)

Also, this:
https://xkcd.com/505/
(Yes, not strictly speaking GOL, but without GOL I would not appreciate the power of cellular automata).

I'm the current developer of INT Minesweeper. Without me, the game would've died long ago because dl-rs never bothered to maintain it.

d binedrkfdrtgy wrote: February 16th, 2026, 9:23 pm If I never heard about CGoL:

• i will have one less way to pass the time
• the CA roleplay ultimate and the cgol rpg would hav one less player

If I never heard about CGoL:
[*]there would be no CA Roleplay Ultimate
[*]unname66609 would be the only "Unname".