4x4 smallest Game of Life

[minestyler007]

after many hours of bugfixing i finally finished my Game of Life. My goal was to make the cells as small as possible but only in terms of length and width.
The clock is at 66 ticks and it is 33 blocks high. Width and length are 4.



inputs are a little bit annoying because they are at the bottom of it.

[LambdaPI]

Nice thats pretty cool.
How did you do the neighbor count?

[newomaster]

Looks cool! When I made one of these several years ago I found the signal strength properties of comparators (set to subtract mode) made good and compact unary adders for neighbor count.

[minestyler007]

neighbour count is done with a hopper and dropper. Per neighbour the dropper will drop one item into the hopper then I count how many items were dropped and will change the cell state accordingly. I did some optimizations with it and got it quite small. The small size comes with long clock times. Because there now is only on input to the logic everything has to be serialized. I can put in some more pictures later if you want

[LambdaPI]

ha thats smart.

[newomaster]

Yeah, I suppose the hardest part of this could actually be bussing the cell state input down from the top of the cells, especially when you have it so thin and tall. Serial is a good solution to that!

For reference, here's the CGL I made a LONG LONG time ago (when comparators first came out I think). They are super short but pretty wide. I dunno how well this sort of design would scale if I tried making it skinnier. The main difference is that I toggled the state of the cells on top:
(bear with my awkward 14-year-old self's narration): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKc6f58aRak

I wonder if some of those torch towers could be removed and rewired somehow?

[minestyler007]

I don't think that you can make them much skinnier, I tried that for some time and you can get to 7x7, maybe 6x6, I think. But I had the idea of flipping my design so the wiring is below and the cell state on top then you can maybe make it smaller and add a pressure plate on top to toggle the cell states more easily. But yours also dosen't lag as much as mine I think.

/warp gameoflife2 if you want to see it, tho using it is a bit hard.

here is a picture of a single cell:

and this is the logic it is only 9 blocks tall so the biggest part is the bussing (the orange just means that this is working, I have about 15 other of these that don't work on my plot):