> I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.

I like the way you think.

I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.

When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.

I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.

Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.

Now that would be simulating life witg life.

My Alma matter has a jumbo version of this, in which the game if life is one of several available mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWall

A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.

Nice. A friend of mine just picked up a Linnstrument, and I’m very tempted to create a Conway’s Game of Life-based musical visualization for it.

https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument

I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?

Très cool.

A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.