Conway's Game of Life, simulating itself, forever

Conway's Game of Life is one of those elegant ideas that punches far above its weight. A grid of cells, four simple rules governing birth, survival, and death, and from that emerges complexity that has fascinated mathematicians and programmers since 1970... And it's been fascinating me since about 1996 when I found a version of it on the family Windows 3.1 computer.

Life Universe by @shr_id takes this already captivating concept and turns it into something genuinely mind-bending. It's a Game of Life simulation where you can zoom in on any living cell and discover that it isn't a filled pixel — it's another Game of Life simulation. And the cells in that simulation are themselves made of yet another layer of Game of Life. It's recursive all the way down (and all the way up, if you zoom out).

What makes this more than a neat trick is the attention to detail. The simulation smoothly scales its speed as you zoom, so each level of recursion feels alive and coherent at whatever scale you're viewing it. The whole thing is also aperiodic in both space and time - due to the infinite recursion you'll never see the same pattern twice no matter how far you scroll or how long you watch.

Drag to explore, scroll to zoom, and use the slider at the bottom to control the speed of generational change. You can lose a surprising amount of time falling through the layers.

Go explore it: Life Universe

Walk on,

Bitpusher
 \`._,'/
 (_- -_)
   \o/