What's that background?
Hi!
As the site's first post, I though I ought to explain what those moving squares you see on the header's and footer's background are.
Well, those are...
Conway's Game of Life
According to Wikipedia:
The Game of Life, also known as Conway's Game of Life or simply Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
After setting up the initial posicion of the "live cells", the rules are simple:
- Underpopulation: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Overpopulation: Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
- Reproduction: Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive.
Here's a live demo, super slowed down (you can click on it to reset it to a new initial cell setup):
On this site's background
The initial alive cells are set up randomly each time you refresh the page, and the game is started.
Why?
Well, just because.
The glider pattern
In Conway's Game of Life, there's a specific pattern, named "the glider" that is able to survive while travelling through the grid. Here you can see it isolated, in action:
The glider pattern was proposed by Eric S. Raymond as an emblem to represent the hacker culture.
So... here we are, and here we start!
Lastly... try it out yourself!
Let's finish up this post nicely, here you have a Game of Life canvas in which you can setup the initial position of cells in the grid:
Welcome to my blog!