Conway’s “Game of Life” Baby Sweater

We love the idea that there will be a new generation of babies growing up wearing handmade math and tech gear. This baby sweater, knitted by Debbie Chachra as a gift to the site’s author, has a pattern derived from Conway’s cellular-automata Game of Life. From the site,”We discussed what design to put on the chest, and I quickly began dreaming up variously unendurably geeky options: A famous mathematical equation? A pixellated video game icon from the 80s? Then I remembered that, of course, knitting and weaving take place in a grid-like lattice, which is why the first robot industrial machines were the automated looms — and, indeed, why we owe some of our earliest concepts of computing to those looms. And then I remembered Conway’s Game of Life, in which you place a set of markers down on a grid, and let them “grow” according to a simple set of rules. The Game of Life is famous for producing unpredictable results from very simple original patterns.” Link.