“As I told you in my article “The Beauty of Math - Conway’s Game of Life Art” I was thinking it would be nice to make a piece of furniture, in this case a small coffee table, that it would be an interesting and pleasant image to display the light games I proposed. It could even be a subject of discussion at a cup of coffee :)
I will not particularly insist on the mathematical theory on which the light effects are displayed, I presented in that article already, but I will insist on how its done, hoping that you will realize how easy it is to build such a piece of furniture.
I also think that you will notice in this article that I tried as much as possible to minimize the cost of the materials and the effort put into practical realization, which I often do in my articles because I do not like to reinvent the wheel. My opinion is that it is much faster and easier when we can call on local craftsmen who know their profession and I cannot have (in my apartment) a glass workshop, a carpentry workshop, a locksmith workshop anyway.
I did not build the table because I wanted, as I said before, to make my work easier, so I ordered the coffee table online (I really like to improve the products I buy). So I chose a simple, modern, elegant with a glass top of course. From the pictures I deduced that it will have the transparent smoked glass top but after a month and a half (!) of waiting, when I received it I had the big surprise that the top was not transparent but it was a black painted glass, completely opaque. That’s why I needed to make another board (I tried one of plexiglas and one of real smoked glass as you will see below).
Let’s start then…”