Diatomic Life

Made for #screensaver jam in January 2016, this tiny (52 kb) screensaver tries to make the little critters in the cellular automaton called "Conway's Game of Life" as lively as possible - by smoothing out their movements.

Normally, Conway's Life is discrete - cells are either on or off. My idea was to come up with a set of movements between states that would make the cells look like they are traveling around the screen. The result is that gliders slide themselves across the screen, wagging a single cell tail behind them.

Periodically, a new beast from the internal zoo of 22 patterns is added to the world, as you slowly orbit the wraparound landscape. You should see gliders, pulsars, ecologists, oscillators, brains, quasars, scrubbers, clocks... all interfering with each other and making a mess.

Configure through the regular screensaver settings preference panel. There are three color schemes and two visual effects. "Hypnoglow" activates a crowd-pleasing bloom-type effect. "Motion Blur" smooths movement between frames with 16x interpolation.