Conway's Game of Life, but Musical
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
hudsong.devTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
20/100
Conway's Game of LifeGenerative MusicCellular Automata
Key topics
Conway's Game of Life
Generative Music
Cellular Automata
The author created a musical version of Conway's Game of Life, generating harmonious sounds based on cell births and deaths, sparking discussion on the algorithm, musical mapping, and potential interactions.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
57m
Peak period
26
0-6h
Avg / period
5.8
Comment distribution35 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 35 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 11, 2025 at 10:05 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 11, 2025 at 11:02 AM EDT
57m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
26 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 14, 2025 at 2:16 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45211868Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:44:06 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Side note, it's the Black Mirror episode Thronglets
What's obviously missing is a "fitness function" that can approximate the equivalent of human taste, so the final evolved forms just end up being widely random in terms of quality.
AlgoMotion also did a video explanation for a music based version of Conway's Game of Life last year. Highly recommend their videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2SjVwYNr54
Incidentally if you like musical toys like this - Electroplankton [1] was a fun little game that had a series of almost organic musical instruments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplankton
Honestly for me this is a feature not a bug. If I want to hear music that matches my personal taste exactly I can just go to my instrument and play it. These tools are a way to taste more exotic forms and see if there's anything worth carrying over.
But when we conceptualize something like music in the form of evolutionary computation then it is important to be able to define a good metric for the fitness function otherwise you might as well just take X pieces of music, normalize them to the same key signature/tempo/etc., and then randomly mash them together.
If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.
This product seems to have shipped successfully without one.
> If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.
This feels needlessly condescending.
But anyways, my idea for a way to resolve the problem of fitness taking forever would be to livestream it on Twitch, in the same vein as the "Twitch plays Pokemon" where viewers can input commands to vote for an action, they could vote on the fitness of musical tracks.
https://tones.wolfram.com/ (not sure if it's still up, doesn't load for me)
“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”
How are you deciding which notes to play?
Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NIxhWQrIU
https://www.whatistoday.net/2019/09/jammer.html
https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/zoa-living-midi-sequencer/id15...
do you expect that in a blind trial it could be distinguished from playing a statistically similar number of tones chosen randomly from the available cells?
https://photos.app.goo.gl/os4nF1RoPJCwNiLt6
Needs flash or iOS. Simple mechanics but lots of fun music. Good design.