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Show HN: Hexagonal Game of Life Explorer

A developer released Hexagonal Game of Life Explorer, a browser-based simulator for hexagonal cellular automata built with Rust/WASM, WebGL2, and Web Workers. The open-source webapp allows users to design, clone, mutate, and evolve rulesets with features like rotational symmetry constraints and rule-based cell coloring.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 21, 2026

I've been working on this Game of Life Explorer Webapp for a couple of years now (later with LLM assistance). It's a browser-based simulator for hexagonal cellular automata where you can design, clone, mutate and evolve rulesets. I'm using Rust/WASM, WebGL2 and Web Workers to get the highest possible performance despite running on a Web browser. I put a lot of effort and time into fleshing out the functionality to make it as easy and enjoyable to use as possible. Granted it takes a special kind of curiosity to enjoy playing around with Cellular Automata.

The features I enjoy the most:

  • Constraining Rulesets to Rotational Symmetry

  • Cloning and Mutating Rulesets

  • Coloring Cells based on the Rule that caused their current state

Intentional limitations:

  • Hexagonal Grid with a maximum size of 576x666 toroidally wrapped

  • binary states

  • neighbourhood distance of 1

Everything is 100% open-source, I really appreciate feedback.

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995088)

Points: 1

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