From a random discussion at work (spawned from my de-stickered already-been-solved Rubik’s Cube), I think someone should build something like this:
Imagine Conway’s Game of Life (GOL) being played on all six surfaces of a connected Rubik’s Cube (RK) covered with LEDs, such that formations could travel across the edges of a face and onto the other edges. Each GOL cubeface is, say, arbitrary MxM, for instance 99×99 — however each twistable cube portion is only 33×33. As a result, if the microcosm traversing the surface of the cube were to stagnate, it could be radically altered with a twist of the cube and drastically alter the game state. This could be a quite interesting piece of art.
An alternative simulation requires contextually aware e-paper, which is much more technologically complicated, because currently such things don’t know where every “pixel” of the paper resides in 3D space. Anyway, suppose there is a GOL being played on a MxN sheet of paper (perhaps both sides), that is totally flexible. Imagine if it could be folded to connect various portions of the page, such as to temporarily form a tube, or folded in various shapes. Further, imagine the following with multiple sheets of contextually aware e-paper, so if you picked up two GOLs and set them together, a creature from one would have a chance to travel to an adjacent page.
We all agreed that GOL in itself was not super-interesting, though I think the idea of cellular automata (or possibly even some form of e-pets) that could move between various surfaces could be pretty neat. A related concept could involve wearing an e-shirt and leaning up against an e-wall with your e-shirt. Just like a “wet paint” scenario, some of the advertisements living on the wall could crawl onto your shirt until you shook it off. Similary, assume a GOL type automata living on your shirt interacting with a GOL automata living on the wall, or having a clean “white” shirt that gets a GOL automata on it by standing too close to the wall. Careful what walls you lean on, you could upset the equilibrium of a wall and kill it… and it might take someone else leaning on the wall to bring it back.
