The world has lost John Conway to covid-19. I recall my first interactions with Life - I had an offer to study undergrad maths at Cambridge. They recognised that folk from state schools were at a disadvantage to those from private schools for their own additional exam, so we got a crash course in the Easter holidays. Somehow Life came up in conversation with another student, and we ended up running the simulation with a deck of cards we had to hand, including moving a glider[^1] across the floor, one tick at a time.
Hackaday challenged us to program Life in memorial, so here goes.
There was some ugly R code here that ran incredibly slowly. But then I’ve been reading Eloquent JavaScript and Plotly was designed for JavaScript, so it wasn’t hard to go from plotting in R to plotting in JS.
See the Pen Life by James Riley (@jimr1603) on CodePen.
A nice side-effect is that what you see above is uniquely running on your machine.