2023/04/15

image2gol

Click the file input and choose an image. This image will be used as the input for running Conway's Game of Life. This is all done on the client with JavaScript.

This is a small idea I have had for a while, finally got around to throwing something together. Every few months I end up thinking about Conway's Game of Life again and want to implement it. It's cliche at this point, but I am continuously fascinated by the complexity that can emerge from such simple constraints.

As-is, this performs a small animation iterating to progressively more constrained black and white versions of the input image, until it is reduced to 2 colors (black and white). Then, the Game of Life is started using that monochrome image (white is considered Alive). This implementation has fixed size, but allows wrapping around at the borders.

This approach is not the most interesting, and I imagine the input could be better preprocessed to enable more interesting results. One could apply some edge detection, blurring, or other scrambling to potentially introduce more initial noise.