Stacked Game of Life

Koen van Gilst looked at Conway's Game of Life—the classic cellular automaton that's been entertaining math nerds since 1970—and thought: "Why is everyone only seeing one layer at a time?" So he built Stacked Game of Life, a 3D visualization that stacks 30 generations of cellular evolution on top of each other like geological strata. You can literally watch the history of a glider unfold in real-time, layer by layer, as patterns emerge and die across time. It's the kind of visualization that's obvious in retrospect—multiple HN commenters said exactly that—but nobody had actually built it until Koen did.

The tool runs in your browser with a 40x40 field, lets you pick from classic patterns like the Gosper Gun and Pulsar, and adjusts speed on the fly. It hit the front page of Hacker News with 195 points and 27 comments in just two weeks, which for an open-source side project is basically a viral moment. The source is on GitHub for anyone who wants to fork it, modify it, or just see how he pulled off the 3D rendering. It's the kind of project that makes you realize how much visual beauty is hiding in plain sight inside algorithms we've had for 55 years.

Koen's already got the source on GitHub if you want to play with it or contribute. This is pure curiosity-driven engineering—no funding, no pitch deck, just someone building something cool and sharing it with the world.