This Homemade Coffee Table Beautifully Renders the Game of Life
Sip your coffee and watch Andrei Erdei's table render each cell’s evolution as the Game of Life is played.
The Game of Life, developed by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970, is a zero-player game — meaning it isn’t really a game at all by a typical person’s standards. Instead, it’s more of a simulation that is designed to illustrate evolution in a simplified manner. The only input occurs before the game starts when the states of cells in a grid are set. Once the game has begun, those cells then move to adjacent spaces and interact with each other based on a set of simple rules. This coffee table designed by Andrei Erdei is a beautiful way to render the Game of Life.
While the Game of Life wasn’t created with art or aesthetics in mind, the animated patterns that result are quite appealing to watch. As each cell population reproduces, spreads, and dies, they wander across the grid in interesting and sometimes mesmerizing ways. Each cell is following a very simple set of rules, but the result of many cells “evolving” looks very complex. Erdei wanted to display that complexity in a decorative way that could be enjoyed at any time, and so he came up with this coffee table design. His tutorial explains how it was built, and how you can replicate it.
Erdei started with a square coffee table that had a glass top, as opposed to constructing his own table from scratch. That came with a black glass top, which Erdei replaced with smoked glass so that the light from the LEDs could shine through — though diffused. Those LEDs are WS2812 individually-addressable RGB LEDS, which are often referred to by the NeoPixel brand name from Adafruit. The LEDs are arranged in a grid and mounted to an MDF sheet that sits below the smoked glass. A Wemos D1 Mini board, which has an Espressif ESP8266 module, is used to control the LEDs. A battery holder acts as an enclosure for that board. A self-hosted website can be accessed from a smartphone in order to set the initial parameters of each game. You can then watch as the table renders each cell’s evolution as the Game of Life is played.