August 2023
My good friend Eloise Rosen found a paper that describes a way to define rules for Conway’s Game of Life on a Penrose tiling in such a way that you can make gliders (patterns that move through the tiles just by following the rules).
She made a website that lets you click tiles to set them to various states and run the game. The tiling was a fixed screen-sized set that she found in an SVG file somewhere. I wrote code to generate the tiling on the fly so that the user can pan around.
We posted it to Facebook, and our mutual friend Adam Scherlis pointed out that my tiling couldn’t possibly be right, because it didn’t follow the rules of Penrose tiles. He was right, and bizarrely, Eloise’s SVG also had this problem, which is why we didn’t detect it in mine. I fixed it and sure enough, the tiles look much more like the Penrose tiles I'm used to seeing.
You can play with it in your browser: penrosegliders.com
The source code is available on GitHub.