Jean Manipulation Machine Information Page

why are the face and the sound doing that?

The grid on the left is hooked up to the facial features on the right, so that the more black cells there are in the part of the grid which contains the feature, the more open the facial feature is. The frequency of the sound is dependent on what percentage of the entire grid is black (more black cells → higher frequency).

what's the grid? how does it work?

It's a modified version of conway's game of life, which is a commonly known type of cellular automoton where certain cells on a grid interact with other cells. The traditional rules of the game (from the previous wikipedia link) are as follows:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

This grid has slightly different rules, however. Instead of alive and dead cells, every cell acts as though it is alive, e.g. the first three rules apply to both colors of cell, and the fourth rule applies to no cells. Both colors consider the other color 'dead'. This prolongs the simulation (conway's game usually ends after a short period of time) - but the cells still tend to settle into specific patterns of movement after a while.