History YMMV / ConwaysGameOfLife

** Rule 2.[[labelnote:Explanation]]Rule 2 of the Conwaylife Lounge is that foul language is disallowed in most circumstances (although exceptions are made for things like "[[UsefulNotes/ProgrammingLanguage Brainfuck]]" since swearing is inherent to the name and censoring it would just lead to confusion). Swearing is therefore often censored as "rule2".[[/labelnote]]

** Is this known?[[labelnote:Explanation]]An ''extremely'' common question asked by both newcomers and experienced users regarding patterns they find. The pattern in question can range from a relatively simple object or reaction known since 1970 to a groundbreaking new discovery. Because of this, the question is often parodied in both directions, with users jokingly asking about either extremely basic patterns such as the block or the blinker, or alleged "patterns" that have not yet been proven to exist (e.g. oscillators with previously unknown periods) or have been proven ''not'' to exist (e.g. impossibly fast spaceships).[[/labelnote]]

* QuicksandBox: With absolutely no objective, it is entirely up to the player to decide what they want to try and build within the constraints of the game. But without external guides, good luck figuring out what ''can'' be built, other than basic patterns like still lifes, oscillators, and spaceships.

*** The Pi-R-Squared spaceship.[[labelnote:Explanation]]A spaceship that was [[https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=57860#p57860 supposedly found]] by Tony Honcho Jarnow ("[[SignificantAnagram John Horton Conway]]") while running random soups on a PDP-12 in 1974, only to be lost seconds later by him [[ShaggyDogStory tripping on a power cable]]. It consists of two pi-heptominoes and two R-pentominoes, and [[RunningGag also moves]] at a speed of c/137. The name is another mild instance of GeniusBonus, referencing the equation for the area of a circle, although the description of the actual spaceship implies an interpretation of (πr)
as opposed to π(r
). Furthermore, the spaceship has a bounding box of [[UsefulNotes/{{Fibonacci}} 55x34]].[[/labelnote]]

* SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome: [[Awesome/TheGameOfLife Has its own page.]]

** Gustavo Ramos Rehermann's February 2015 prediction of a synthesis of the caterpillar with 386 gliders. This claim was not taken seriously by most people at the time, especially because the caterpillar itself contains ''thousands'' of gliders. However, Gustavo was later proven ''[[AccidentallyCorrectWriting correct]]'' in 2018 with the advent of the reverse caber tosser, which showed that the caterpillar could, in theory, be synthesized with no more than 329 gliders.[[note]]Assuming it has a glider synthesis to begin with, which is not proven but believed to be highly likely[[/note]] Later improvements to the reverse caber tosser have lowered this number to ''16 gliders'' as of August 2022.

** The cellular automata fandom has a significant amount of overlap with the [[EleventyZillion googology]], [[AlienGeometries polytope]], and {{Conlang}} communities.

** The cellular automata fandom has a significant amount of overlap with the [[EleventyZillion googology]],[[AlienGeometries polytope]], and {{Conlang}} communities.

** The cellular automata fandom has a significant amount of overlap with the [[EleventyZillion googology]] and [[AlienGeometries polytope]] communities.

* FriendlyFandoms: The cellular automata fandom has a significant amount of overlap with the [[EleventyZillion googology]] and [[AlienGeometries polytope]] communities.
* HilariousInHindsight: For AprilFoolsDay in 2018, a random-looking "soup" pattern was advertised to eventually release a spaceship called the loafer, the catch being that the soup did function like so but was found with a special program for the purpose and not with actual randomness. ''Two years to the day'' after this joke, a genuinely random soup was found to release a loafer in its evolution.

* PopCultureIsolation: Most people who know about Conway's Game of Life are those with some sort of programming knowledge.

* SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome: [[Awesome/TheGameOfLife Has its own page.]]

** December 6 is "[[AddedAlliterativeAppeal doo-dah day]]", commemorating the discovery of the spaceship "doo-dah" on December 6, 2020.

* DancingBear: Many contraptions created in the Game of Life use [[TheAllegedComputer complex and extremely wasteful]] techniques to perform relatively simple calculations, and the interest in them mainly comes from the fact that they successfully perform their job at all.
** Adam P. Goucher's [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin pi and phi calculators]] take billions or even trillions of generations to calculate just a few decimal digits. It placed at second out of 12 entries in the [=ConwayLife=] forums' Pattern of the Year competition in 2010.
** Any universal computer, such as Paul Rendell's [[UsefulNotes/AlanTuring Turing]] machines. Even a regular Turing machine is an extremely inefficient way to perform calculations, and adding another layer of abstraction by emulating it in Life only makes it orders of magnitude slower. However, when Rendell extended his Turing machine to be "fully universal" in 2011, it tied for first place in Pattern of the Year.
** In 2013, a challenge was posted on Stack Exchange to "build a working game of ''{{VideoGame/Tetris}}'' in Conway's Game of Life". The resulting pattern, the "Quest for ''Tetris'' Processor", was completed in 2017 thanks to the combined efforts of at least nine different Stack Exchange users. However, it uses one more layer of abstraction than is probably necessary - it uses [[RecursiveReality metacells]] to simulate a custom-made cellular automaton called [=VarLife=], which in turn uses its own metacells to simulate a game of ''Tetris''. Despite obvious inefficiencies, the Quest for ''Tetris'' machine was still nominated for Pattern of the Year, and ended up tying for 12th place out of 25 entries.
** Goucher's 0E0P[[note]]0E0P = "zero encoded (by) zero population"[[/note]] metacell. Unlike previous examples of unit cells, this one "dies" by completely and cleanly self-destructing. Notably, this proves that certain exotic types of patterns known to exist in other cellular automata must therefore also exist in Conway's Game of Life. However, the metacell is simultaneously orders of magnitude larger (~262,000 cells across) and takes orders of magnitude slower (over 68 ''billion'' generations just to simulate a single metageneration). To prove that it works, Goucher created a specialized algorithm called "[=StreamLife=]" which is optimized for this specific type of pattern. Even still, it took about a month running [=StreamLife=] to confirm that a single metacell would stay alive for a single metageneration. Out of an unprecedented 34 entries for Pattern of the Year in 2018, the 0E0P metacell ranked second.
** The reverse caber-tosser, which Goucher was also heavily involved in creating, theoretically allows any conceivable glider synthesis to be encoded in a single glider.[[note]]Specifically, the glider's exact distance from the rest of the mechanism contains the data that allows an arbitrary glider synthesis to be recreated.[[/note]] As of July 2022, this proves that no pattern takes more than 16 gliders to synthesize, unless it is completely unsynthesizable. The problem is that the reverse caber-tosser takes a ''prohibitively'' long time to simulate, as the length of time the construction takes increases exponentially as the recipe gets longer. Even synthesizing a relatively simple object requires an extremely long recipe, as all the leftover debris has to be cleaned up somehow. The reverse caber-tosser nonetheless ranked third in the 2018 Pattern of the Year competition, just behind the aforementioned 0E0P metacell.

* SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome: [[Awesome/TheGameOfLife Has its own page.]]

* MisaimedFandom: Conway's original goal when creating the Game of Life was merely to create a simple ruleset that nonetheless exhibited certain complex behavior. Despite this, it (along with other similar cellular automata) has been picked up by some people as [[EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory evidence to support]] various pseudoscientific theories about the RealLife universe, such as that [[RecursiveReality reality is a simulation]] and/or that it obeys a set of cellular automaton rules at the smallest scale.

** What is "sesame oil"?[[labelnote:Explanation]]A rather cryptic forum post from 2015 supposedly asking about a pattern named "sesame oil", which does not (yet) exist. [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext No further context was given.]][[/labelnote]]

** The magical(?) box.[[labelnote:Explanation]]In 2019, a text box was added to the website Catagolue where users could submit glider syntheses (and later glider guns) to be automatically parsed and added to the database. It was almost immediately referred to as "magical" as it made the cataloging of glider syntheses significantly less of a headache. Although this was meant figuratively, an argument ensued about whether or not the submission box really qualified as "magic".[[/labelnote]]

* MemeticBadass: Some variations on the "magical box" meme portray the box as a sentient being, while others use [[OminousVisualGlitch "glitch text"]] to emphasize its supposed powers.

** The magical(?) box.[[labelnote:Explanation]]In 2019, a text box was added to the website Catagolue where users could submit glider syntheses (and later glider guns) to be automatically parsed and added to the database. It was almost immediately referred to as "magical" as it made the cataloging of glider syntheses significantly less of a headache. Although this was meant figuratively, an argument ensued about whether or not the submission box really qualified as "magic".[[/labelnote]]

** Goucher's 0E0P[[note]]0E0P = "zero encoded (by) zero population"[[/note]] metacell. Unlike previous examples of unit cells, this one "dies" by completely self-destructing. Notably, this proves that certain exotic types of patterns known to exist in other cellular automata must therefore also exist in Conway's Game of Life. However, the metacell is simultaneously orders of magnitude larger (~262,000 cells across) and takes orders of magnitude slower (over 68 ''billion'' generations just to simulate a single metageneration). To prove that it works, Goucher created a specialized algorithm called "[=StreamLife=]" which is optimized for this specific type of pattern. Even still, it took about a month running [=StreamLife=] to confirm that a single metacell would stay alive for a single metageneration. Out of an unprecedented 34 entries for Pattern of the Year in 2018, the 0E0P metacell ranked second.

** There may be bugs in gfind.[[labelnote:Explanation]]In March 2016, a new user joined the forum and immediately posted their discovery of a spaceship moving one cell every ten generations, asking if it was known. It wasn't. The spaceship, later given the name "copperhead", was found while testing a modified version of the search program gfind, and so the user remarked that "there may be bugs in gfind" (sic) which would explain how the copperhead went undiscovered for so many years. It turned out that there weren't any bugs - the original gfind was perfectly capable of rediscovering the copperhead in a reasonable amount of time, but no one thought to search for it because [[AchievementsInIgnorance they assumed searching for a spaceship with such a high period would be too difficult]].[[/labelnote]]

* HilariousInHindsight: For AprilFoolsDay in 2018, a random-looking "soup" pattern was advertised to eventually release a spaceship called the loafer, the catch being that the soup did function like so but was found with a special program for the purpose and not with actual randomness. ''Two years to the day'' after this joke, a genuinely random soup was found to release a loafer in its evolution.