I’ve been meaning to make a series of videos on Conway’s Game of Life for a few years now, and I finally decided that rather than rehashing topics that are already covered in the textbook, I’ll make videos explaining particularly notable new discoveries as they’re made. Unfortunately, the news that Life is omniperiodic is somewhat well-worn at this point, so I started this week with a video about the newly-discovered true period 15 and 16 glider guns (which are both the first guns of their respective periods ever found, and which were found less than 5 hours apart!):

The video does delve into some “rehashed” stuff, like what a B-heptomino is, and how guns work in general, but that’s unavoidable if I want the video to be understandable to more than 100 or so people in the world. Hopefully a few news videos like this might actually convince enough people that Life is interesting enough so as to bump that “100” number up in the near future!