Life from the beacon

Life

Every ~2 s the beacon hashes live plasma. Pick one hash, and this page grows a small world from it.

The hash decides which cells are born. Thirty-two steps of Conway’s Game of Life later, the entire history is folded into one fingerprint. The same pulse always grows the same world — so any world born here can be re-grown and checked, anywhere, forever.

Replay one
Pulse

Runs entirely in your browser · same algorithm as the Rail reference implementation · fingerprints must match bit-for-bit

The universe

One pulse, one world.

Cells live or die by Conway’s rules on a 40×20 wrap-around grid. Below the board, every generation is folded into a running SHA-256 chain — the ledger is the world’s diary, and the final line commits all of it.

gen alive chain
awaiting a pulse…
chain head
Replay

Re-grow any world from its birth certificate.

A world’s birth certificate is just its pulse number and pulse hash. Paste one below — yours from earlier, or a friend’s — and the same world unfolds again. If the fingerprint at the end matches the original, nothing about that history was altered. That’s the whole trick: not trust me, check me.

accepts “pulse hash”, “pulse:hash”, or a full seed string

How it works

Born from a hash, judged by the same hash.

Step 1

Seed

The pulse hash is stretched by SHA-256 into 800 bytes; each byte decides one cell. Nobody draws the starting pattern — the world is the hash.

Step 2

Evolve

Conway’s rules run 32 generations. No randomness anywhere: the future was already implied the moment the pulse landed. Running it doesn’t create the history — it discovers it.

Step 3

Witness

Each generation is folded into a SHA-256 chain. Reorder, skip, or retouch any frame and every later fingerprint changes. The head is a 32-byte name for the entire history.

This page recomputes two reference worlds on load — produced independently by the Rail implementation — and shows whether your browser agrees:

checking reference vectors…