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Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
- hashBlue 14y agonot for me
- jbperry 14y agoIf you are on a big screen, it might not be obvious. It's in the upper right and it's very subtle.
- moreati 14y agoVery, very subtle. I had to adjust the angle of the screen
- morsch 14y agoIt might be worth recalibrating your screen. This page ff. is a good start: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php
- gknoy 14y agoIt might also be dependent on the angle at which one is viewing the LCD -- on my laptop at work, I often cannot distinguish some of the lighter shades, as I have the screen at a glare-reducing angle.
- ari_elle 14y agoDon't forget to allow scripts :D
- ben0x539 14y agoAnd set an inconspicuous user agent!
- apgwoz 14y agoDidn't work in Firefox for me, but worked in Chromium.
- Semaphor 14y agoworking in FF for me:)
- jonmwords 14y agoHere's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-built-a-universe-in-an-easter-egg.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...
- missing_cipher 14y agoGreat read. Thanks. :)
- jonmwords 14y agoGlad you liked it. I'm glad people are finding out about this and think it's as cool as I do.
- Cieplak 14y agoRWW: So it took two months to do this? PD: It’s not a trivial problem. It’s tricky. I’m quite proud of the way I did it. I can’t talk about the way we actually implemented it. (laughs) I wonder how they implemented it so that it renders so efficiently.
- jonmwords 14y agoMeeeeee, too. Me, too. Believe me, I tried.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoCan you talk about what is difficult about it? I know that Windows game of life programs can use hashes of positions to compute new steps even for massive worlds very efficiently. Is the JS difficulty with the graphics on the canvas? Or something else?
- jonmwords 14y agoHe wouldn't give me any specifics at all, but I can tell you that the challenge was related to the extremely low tolerance for lag on a search result page that's treated as law company-wide. He had to do it without slowing down the search page AT ALL, for anybody. Check it out; it even works on mobile.
- RossM 14y agoThere appears to be a semi-persistent "Google" text - when I cleared out the 'G' it was recreated within 20 steps by the neighbouring 'o'. Can't possibly be organic can it? E: it seems to always appear like that; so probably not organic and I'm not up for searching minified sources to verify.
- amaks 14y agoCould it be an easter egg?
- RossM 14y agoWas under the impression the whole thing was - just didn't notice it at first and had a bit of a woah moment :)
- alainbryden 14y agoIt always appears like that because he's written it so that when the "Google" cells are active, they appear darker than normal active cells. Whether these cells get activated or not follow the normal rules of Conway's game of live. So yeah, it's organic, but with a little trickery, the "Google" stands out as the pixels in the area blink on and off. You can confirm this by pausing the simulation and clicking on all the cells in the region to switch them to the 'active' state: http://imageshack.us/a/img138/2751/71405409.png http://imageshack.us/a/img138/2751/71405409.png
- nrabins 14y agoIt appears that there is some sort of spawning behavior near the darkened "Google" tiles. I paused, turned off all the cells in the region (taking into account wrapping from the other side) and let it go. Cells started activating near the 'e'.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alainbryden 14y ago
- sdrgalvis 14y agoWhat a reminiscent moment :)
- pixelbeat 14y agoAdded to my list, thanks. http://www.pixelbeat.org/misc/google_search_easter_eggs.html http://www.pixelbeat.org/misc/google_search_easter_eggs.html
- alainbryden 14y agoLooks like "ascii art" and "comic sans" are retired :(
- smcl 14y agohey pixelbeat, another one for the list - looks like "octal" returns the number of search results in octal
- dualogy 14y agoSame for binary & hexadecimal. Man, those guys are engineers indeed. Always going the full mile...
- nostrademons 14y agoHeh, I implemented the [binary]/[octal]/[hexadecimal]/[hex] ones, and was TL for [let it snow]. :-)
- alainbryden 14y agoThere's a bunch more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google%27s_hoaxes_and_easter_eggs#Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google%27s_hoaxes_and_e... Like "zerg rush", "kerning" and "keming", searching for bacon numbers, etc...
- Laremere 14y agoSearch "number of horns on a unicorn", it gives a google calculator result of 1.
- saraid216 14y agoIt's basically an alias for 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+horns+on+a+unicorn+%2F+2 https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+horns+on+a+unicorn... I know there are a ton more phrases that work as calculator aliases, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
- nsxwolf 14y agoCool! A glider crawled all the way across my browser.
- carlob 14y agoFirst the knowledge graph, now the game of life animation. It really seems Google is trying to be more and more like Wolfram|Alpha! :)
- saraid216 14y agoI just checked Wolfram Alpha and couldn't find the Javascript animation of game of life. Could you link me to how you did it?
- carlob 14y agoEvery time you do a query on W|A you see a brief animation of the game of life while the result is loading. I was referring to that. (and my comment was meant tongue in cheek)
- mck- 14y agojust spent 10 minutes staring at it full-screen.. beautiful.. my wife looked at my twinkly eyes and asked befuddled: "what is this?" How would you explain it?
- rytis 14y agoHa, my daughter asked the same question, so I tried explaining all 4 rules, but she didn't seem to be very impressed. So I quickly googled, found this http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ among the top result, and we went through all 4 rules, experimenting. That was a lot more interesting, especially when she found out about the 'objects'... :) So the page is bookmarked now :)
- mck- 14y agoHehe, yeah, I tried explaining too, with all my passion, she just stared at me and said: "I have a nerdy husband" -_-' I'll give it another shot with that link, perhaps tomorrow :)
- doki_pen 14y agoIs it my imagination or does it spell out google at some point? edit: I've realized that certain blocks are darker blue in the shape of the word Google.
- tsahyt 14y agoWhat is it with all the Game of Life posts lately? There seems to be a new one every other day. Not that it's a bad thing, I think the GOL is a marvellous thing and the SmoothLife video was mesmerizing. I'm just wondering why they all pop up at the same time?
- eranation 14y agoI'm sure there is a "game of life" like biological algorithm that can explain this and the flow of articles in the form of "X in GO" or "Don't use MongoDB" or "Y in pure CSS" e.g. perhaps people see what's top on HN (a legitimate article) and search on the topic, and increase the probability of more posts in that topic, also, psychologically, if A is popular, then when seeing something that looks like A you might up vote it just by assuming it's popular too.
- pirateking 14y agoA Game of Life type visualization of this algorithm would be interesting. It might go something like: The seed of the system is a random cluster of N stories (cells) that represent the "front page". Each cell has votes and topics (Erlang, Apple, X in CSS, etc.). 1. Any cell with fewer than N votes, and fewer than two neighbors dies (due to lack of interest and/or promotion). 2. Any cell with two or three live neighbors, lives on to the next generation (riding along the front page wave). 3. Any cell with more than three live neighbors, that share the same topic dies (due to overexposure of the topic). 4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors, becomes a live cell with a topic shared by one of the neighbors (the spread of interest of a topic). After any generation, votes and stories can be added. The low threshold of votes (N), is determined to be some percentage of all votes in the system. Tempted to make this for fun now...
- saraid216 14y agoSeeing one Topic-X post will trigger many people to think, "Oh, and I remember Y-related-to-Topic-X," as well as "Hey, I wonder if I could find out more about Y-related-to-Topic-X," and away you go. Also, http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Hidden-Pattern-Behind-Everything/dp/0525951601 http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Hidden-Pattern-Behind-Everythin... (even though it is not a great book; it is mediocre IMO).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eranation 14y agoPredicting the next HN front page article in the near future: "Show HN: weekend project - open source Google's conway's game of life"
- raganwald 14y agoPeaking at #3: "Screencast: Learn Go by Implementing Google's Game of Life." And from the 2010 archives: "Conway's Game of Life is a Monad."
- eranation 14y agoWell, I was predicting the past, not the future, although this post got 2 points (1 is mine) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314049 Here is the original: http://arcanis.github.com/trivia.gol404/404.html http://arcanis.github.com/trivia.gol404/404.html 3% CPU max
- jschuur 14y ago"Do you still want to be writing Game of Life easter aggs when you're 50?"
- madrona 14y agoAnd the rebuttal, "Yes, I want to be writing Game of Life easter eggs"
- iamgopal 14y agoI hope googling "todo list" do not show to do list on google result page, that had make me go out of business.
- callil 14y agoI want this as a live-tile background for my phone. Beautiful
- huskyr 14y agoIt's funny. I simply Googled for 'conway's game of life' after reading all the posts here and was pleasantly surprised to find this nice easter egg. I submitted it, and now it has been #1 for the past couple of hours :)
- alecr 14y agoI've implemented Langton's Ant, another example of cellular automata, using canvas aswell http://alecraeside.com.au/projects/langtons-ant/ http://alecraeside.com.au/projects/langtons-ant/
- talfa 14y agoI am in Malaysia and it doesn't show up in FF or Chrome.