This is the kind of visualisation that obvious in retrospect, but I don't think anybody's done this before. Very nice.
I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
Yeah I helped build a 3D parametric engine a few years back at my company. This kind of stacked game of life was one of the first script I added to test it, alongside the 3D terrain generation using Perlin noise.
I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells
I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).
I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.
Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic feel.
I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat.
What does stacked mean? Is this just 3D game of life where cells die unless 5-6 neighbours and come alive with 4 neighbours? But very cool, would also be cool if you could specify initial configurations perhaps. (BTW, github link seems broken.)
I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
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