ConwayLife.com

Hello, fellow Game of Life enthusiasts!

Some of you may know that I take a rather ... how to put this delicately? ... "playful" approach to Game of Life, so I'm not necessarily a hardcore researcher into the mathematical side of things here.

Regardless, as a side effect of me fooling around with GOL, I turned some of my work into "Productivity Tools", i.e. a "Pomodoro" visualizer and "Focus Time / Study Ambience", free to use if you are into that sort of thing:
I use such videos to structure my focus / study time, so maybe you find this useful, too - plus it has a tangential connection to GOL, a topic very dear and close to us:

■ https://youtu.be/TkuvjqUmino
■ https://youtu.be/mYn3exzdH0g

While I haven't watched them myself, I know we've gotten a few influxes of new members from YouTube videos over the years. Keep doing it!

hotdogPi wrote: September 7th, 2026, 9:16 am While I haven't watched them myself, I know we've gotten a few influxes of new members from YouTube videos over the years. Keep doing it!

Are you implying that I might be responsible for this? I'd feel flattered, mind you - but I don't think any of my work as gotten enough reach to be noticable here...

hash0 wrote: September 7th, 2026, 9:19 am

hotdogPi wrote: September 7th, 2026, 9:16 am While I haven't watched them myself, I know we've gotten a few influxes of new members from YouTube videos over the years. Keep doing it!

Are you implying that I might be responsible for this? I'd feel flattered, mind you - but I don't think any of my work as gotten enough reach to be noticable here...

I don't remember whose videos they were. One of them was in French.

Here's the CGoL screensaver I use right now. There may be a way to turn this into a video.

NNlk05 wrote: September 7th, 2026, 11:09 am Here's the CGoL screensaver I use right now. There may be a way to turn this into a video.

I feel like having a screensaver constantly updating in the background would be distracting. The way I think this could best be dealt with is by slowly fading in the next generation over the course of 10 minutes while fading the previous generation out.

hotdogPi wrote: September 7th, 2026, 10:03 am I don't remember whose videos they were. One of them was in French.

Definitely not me, then! But given the Frenchs' history and the generations of sublime mathematicians they brought forth (they and the Russians, gotta hand it to them...), I can only imagine that those must be very good videos.

LuveelVoom wrote: September 7th, 2026, 11:20 am

NNlk05 wrote: September 7th, 2026, 11:09 am Here's the CGoL screensaver I use right now. There may be a way to turn this into a video.

I feel like having a screensaver constantly updating in the background would be distracting. The way I think this could best be dealt with is by slowly fading in the next generation over the course of 10 minutes while fading the previous generation out.

Definitely doable, in both variants: constantly updating and slow fade. I can see the appeal in both - it's probably like watching an aquarium or a log fire.