// 03 HARDWARE

Jetson TX1

CUDA C++ PYTHON

An NVIDIA Jetson TX1 from 2015 — 256 Maxwell CUDA cores and 4 GB of memory shared with a quad-core ARM CPU — running the Game of Life on all eleven tilings made of regular polygons. A rule counts the share of a cell's neighbours alive rather than their number, so one rule means the same thing to a triangle with three neighbours and a dodecagon with twelve. The board searched 6,820 random rules for ones that move; these are the best, alongside new rules where colour, size, shape and time change the game.

> Every game, and the rule it followson YouTube5:05

Nested hexagonal rings of gold dodecagons spreading from a spiral at the centre, on the 4.6.12 tiling, with a dim trail of resting cells behind each ring

01 Dodecagon shock rings, 4.6.12

The 4.6.12 tiling split into large territories of red, violet, cyan, yellow and green cells, each colour a species that only survives among its own kind

02 Colour genes: species wars

A reaction-diffusion maze on the 4.8.8 tiling whose orange corridors run only horizontally and vertically, along chains of octagons

03 Turing maze, 4.8.8

Smooth rainbow phase fields on the 4.6.12 tiling: large regions of one colour meeting at points where every colour comes together, the cores of spirals

04 Kuramoto clocks, 4.6.12

Small magenta spaceships of hexagons and triangles scattered across a dark kagome tiling, each flying away from where it formed

05 Kagome spaceships, 3.6.3.6

A lace of coloured strands on the kagome tiling, the hue shifting smoothly from blue through green and yellow to pink along each strand

06 Colour genes: rainbow lace

Pale gold flashes covering most of the 4.6.12 tiling at once, with dark patches still out of step, as the blinking tiles fall into one rhythm

07 Firefly sync, 4.6.12

Pink and violet Lenia stripes on a 512 by 512 pixel grid, combed into long parallel bands by the flow of a simulated fluid

08 Lenia stirred by a fluid

The rules

Every game here is one simple rule, applied to every tile at once, step after step. The families:

Life and its trails. Born when the share of live neighbours falls in one window, survives in another, and in the Generations variant a dying cell fades through a few resting states first. Square-row highways, kagome spaceships and dodecagon shock rings are this.
Cyclic. Colours in a loop, like rock, paper, scissors: a cell takes the next colour once enough of its neighbours have it. Spirals, whose shape the tiling sets.
Lenia. Life with dimmers instead of switches: each cell is a number from 0 to 1 that grows when the ring of cells around it is just full enough.
Turing patterns. Two chemicals, one fed in and one eating it, diffusing across shared edges (Gray–Scott), into mazes, frozen spots and spots that divide.
New ones. Colour genes, where a newborn takes its parents' average hue and only counts its own kind; three Life games in red, green and blue that eat each other; live area instead of live cells, so big polygons need a crowd; neighbours of another shape counting for and of the same shape against; hit points equal to a polygon's sides; a clock per shape; and blinking oscillators that fall into step.
Fluid life. Lenia and Conway's own rule on a 512 × 512 grid inside a stable-fluids simulation: stirred, carried by a current, or pushing the water themselves.

How it runs

tilings.py builds each tiling as a periodic unit cell and checks it: areas, edge lengths, shared edges and 360° at every vertex. One CUDA engine, compiled for the TX1's sm_53, runs any tiling under any rule and writes PNG frames straight to video; a second runs the fluid. A random search scored 6,820 rules across the eleven tilings, a probe re-ran the promising ones looking for gliders (cells that are live now, were dead in the same place a few steps ago, and were live a little way off), and the best were filmed.

The same engine also serves them live: a small HTTP and WebSocket server on the board runs each preset someone is watching as a wrapping world, and sends each browser only the cells under its view, XOR'd against the last frame and deflated — about 0.1 to 25 KB a frame. A WebGL2 shader turns cell states back into polygons, so panning and zooming run at the display's rate. Twelve viewers get about 24 frames a second each, and forty about 15.

The explainer

The presenter is the Carter chibi from chibi-maker, lip-synced to the narration and posed scene by scene. The narration is my own voice, cloned from a fifteen-second recording by Chatterbox, the model behind ComfyUI's Voice Clone node, run on my own machine. Every clip is the board's own footage. There is a thirty-second phone cut as well.