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thearn
game-of-life
Python2014–2025
thearn / game-of-life

game-of-life

Simple Python implementation of Conway's game of life and other cellular automata, computed using numpy.fft

Games & EmulationScience & Engineering
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
9Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
188GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Simple Python implementation of Conway's game of life and other cellular automata, computed using numpy.fft

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

FFT and the convolution theorem are some of my favorite tricks in math. A toy I made a few years back: https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life

thearn4 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-02-27 20:24:12 UTC to 2025-05-02 15:11:51 UTC.

01232014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

9 sources
thearn4·May 2, 2025Submission

Show HN: Interactive Cellular Automata Demo

Going back to a very old school notion of "AI" : just updated a demo I did a few years back on efficiently computing cellular automata forward steps using convolution operations. Added a huggingface demo too. https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life for fun, I let users swap rules dynamically in the app, try letting it run Conway for a short bit, pause the simulation, switch to Maze and start from there.
1 points · Open discussion
westurner·Jul 30, 2023
scipy.ndimage.convolve / scipy.fftpack.dct* From https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life : > How it's written > The game grid is encoded as a simple m by n array (default 100x100 in the code) of zeros and ones. In each program, a state transition is determined for each pixel by looking at the 8 pixel values all around it, and counting how many of them are "alive", then applying some rules based that number. Since the "alive" or "dead" states are just encoded as 1 or 0, this is equivalent to summing up the values of all 8 neighbors. > If you want to do this for all pixels in a single shot, this is equivalent to computing the 2D convolution between the game state array and the matrix [[1,1,1],[1,0,1],[1,1,1]]. Convolution is an operation that basically applies that matrix as a "stencil" at every position around the game grid array, and sums
Read the rest
up the values according to the values in that stencil. And convolution can be very efficiently computed using the FFT, thanks to the Fourier Convolution Theorem. > One side effect: the convolution using FFT implicitly involves periodic boundary conditions, so the game grid is "wrapped" around itself (like in Pacman, or Mario Bros. 2). If you wanted to change this, you would just have to modify the 2D convolution function to use an orthogonal form of the DCT instead of the FFT. This would correspond to "hard" (i.e. Dirichlet) boundary conditions on the convolution operator. > I think you could do this with scipy using the 1D orthogonal dct provided: from scipy import fftpack fftpack.dct(data, norm='ortho') > but I haven't tried that yet. You'd have to define a dct2() method using fftpack.dct and separability (ie. the 1D transform matrix is rank-one, and the 2D transform operator is the Kronecker product of two 1D transforms) The (Inverse) Quantum Fourier Transform is also applied in QC; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform#Defi...
In Solar Powered Conways Game of Life

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