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THE GAME OF LIFE and other DONGs!


4m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here with some things you can do online now, guys.

Let's start the DONGs off in the right hands with misternicehands.com. You can pull his finger. Wordle.net analyzes text, like on a web site, and generates a free word cloud with fun sizes correlating to the frequency with which the words are used. Pretty awesome, right? But is it the most awesomest thing ever dot com? The site pits two things against each other and lets you vote on which of the two things is awesome. For instance, pilgrims versus Andrew Jackson. I'm gonna have to go with pilgrims. But periodic table or Orson Welles? Which is awesomer? Okay, it's tough, but I'm gonna have to go with Mendeleev.

Now, the site tabulates everyone's answers and runs a list of what people currently consider to be the most awesome. Notice that right now, life is being beat by the Internet. Got a song stuck in your head? Go to unhearit.com, a site dedicated to playing equally catchy songs, with the hope of removing the one that's stuck in your head. And if you like what you hear, check out TuneGlue. Type in a band to add them to the field and then expand them to see other bands related.

Now, I also like Music-Map, where you can enter a musician's name and other bands orbit them at distances related to how similar their styles are. If you're tired of music recognition programs that don't allow you to sing your own song or hum, enter midomi.com. It's still not perfect, but I am terrible and Midomi still understood what I was trying to do. "I won't loose a baby, so why don't you kill me?" Amazing. Another flawless performance by Michael Stevens.

ThunderShark78 introduced me to Fracuum, a series of mazes you continually shrink down into. The perspective is pretty cool. Now let's get mathematical with Conway's Game of Life. This one's a doozy, but it's really famous. Right now I'm playing it as a downloadable version for PC, Mac or Linux, known as "Golly." So, the game itself is simply a grid that I can fill in, and whether a cell is alive or dead determines what the next generation will look like.

What made this game so famous is that using just a few deterministic rules, we're able to create some quite complex things. Now classically, the rules are very simple. The fate of a cell depends on the status of its 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 neighbors. If two or three cells surround it, it's gonna be fine; it's going to continue to live. But if fewer than two, or if more than three exist around it, it will die of isolation or overcrowding. Now, likewise, if a dead empty cell has 3, exactly three neighbors, it will come to life.

So the next generation of this shape looks like this. It's amazing how just a few simple deterministic rules can allow you to create shapes like this one, known as a glider, which across successive generations actually locomotes. Oh, and GMSlash showed me a version where the cells are mushrooms, and the longer a cell lives, the bigger the mushroom gets. But what's a game of life without love? Themediabuffs sent me pretentious game, a wonderful interactive poem that's touching, but aware of itself.

And Connor showed me an even more tragic love, a game where you play a guy in love with a zombie. Get her to follow you, but keep her in a cage. Also cute is Night of the Loving Dead. You play a skeleton who must find his body parts to reunite with his true love. As you acquire organs, like your brain, you can begin to use new powers.

Now, if you're not in love with a zombie and would prefer to prepare for their attack, TheArzonite offers you Map of the Dead, a global Google Map delineating areas where zombie activity will likely be highest in the event of an outbreak. It includes helpful landmarks, like nearby food and ammunition shops, so you can plan your strategy now. If this is all a bit too scary for you, relax with N3xTB0y's z0r.de, a collection of quick looping images and silly music.

Shantuku discovered this neat interactive scale of the universe tool. We've covered things like this before, but you can never have enough. While we're out in space, let's get bigger plane cosmic crush, like Amonfobious'. Collide with smaller items to grow larger and avoid giant dangerous celestial objects. Here on YouTube, Vixolent uploaded a really well-made interactive game. You play within a single video, and his use of annotations is quite ingenious.

And TheRealMcJoni made this impressive interactive domino video. The tricks and layout are really neat and you get to choose a direction at the end of the video - let's hope it's the right one. Back to Metronomy. Subscribe to Vsauce for more. And as always, thanks for watching.

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