When I was in university I coded “Conway’s Game of Life”, which is a primitive simulation of cellular life, if there are a certain number of live cells around they produce more cells and if conditions are not favorable cells die off. I don’t know what the meaning of life is. Would at some point the argument come to say that AI is alive? This is very philosophical, this post is instead a very practical showcase of some of the most recent tools and advances in AI as I play with them.

Just have a look at this photo:

As you can see I’m somewhere in a mall, asking my Claude Cowork running on my mac at home to create a folder ~/Projects/gameoflifecowork and generate a single HTML page with Conway’s game of life implementation. I came home and there it was an html page right in that folder with the implementation. It is perfectly working. I’m adding it here. If you are reading from e-mail you would need to open the blog to see it in action.

[if you are reading from e-mail you might need to open in browser to see The Game Of Life]

Cowork is an extremely powerful (and dangerous tool). It is not yet a very smooth experience. Sometimes I need it to prompt multiple times, most of the time there is no proper feedback in the Mobile app so I don’t know what is happening. For instance, I also asked it to go to my “Downloads” folder and locate any concert tickets and tell me how much I paid for them. Unfortunately there was no way to see on the mobile app the answer to the tickets (not in any chat), but when I came home I saw a dedicated chat open on my computer that had the answer.

Under the hood Cowork runs Claude Code to implement the game of life, so I was wondering if I can compare different models and how good of a job they do, so I installed Open Code and connected Gemini API, Anthropic API, and also local LLM!

With Gemini API I generated a really great fast full screen Game Of Life, which cost me about 0.20$. Local llama3.1 unfortunately is not suitable for this task, I had to give it many additional instructions and it messed up every time until in the end I got an empty html file with some broken functionality, which I fixed with Copilot just to get it render:

Gemini’s Game of Life was full screen and rendered perfectly:

I then switched to Claude Haiku 4.5 to generate the Game of Life you can see above.

This implementation cost me about 0.33$. 

What was a small mini-assignment at university to code the Game Of Life, which I did with C++ and probably took me few days, now turns out to be just 0.20$-0.30$ throwaway code just to test different API integrations. Right now I understand why those cells live and die as I wrote this algorithm myself in C++ but I’m wondering if at one point we will not know what is happening inside implementations generated by AI.

Life remains for the most part a mystery to science, though we are getting closer and closer to understanding how it works. At the same time a reverse is happening with AI we are slowly getting further and further from understanding what goes into the beautiful implementation of Game of Life.