i feel like it must be but I can’t figure out how

The other replies are close but not quite. This is an elementary cellular automaton, the simplest form of cellular automaton. For every pixel in the last layer, it determines if the pixel in the next layer should be 0(white) or 1(black) based on the last layer’s pixel and it’s neighbors.

The game of life is also a cellular automaton but it’s 2 dimensional, elementary cellular automaton are 1 dimensional resulting in a maximum of 256 variations called “rules”. The rules are represented by 8 binary digits which also represent a number between 0 and 255.

What you see here is rule 00100010, or in other words rule 34.

@Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone already gave you a good answer. It’s a unidimensional cellular automata model described as rule 34. You read more about it in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_cellular_automaton

i believe this is the game of life? basically, each square represents whether it’s alive or not (white = dead, black = alive), and each frame (image, in this case), each square decides whether it’s alive or not depending on the squares around it according to some rules i forgot but should be covered in the link

think it has something to do with conways game of life, the pixel patterns look similar