Shameless plug: Have some fun over possible setups of cellular-automata (which conway's game of life is a subset of): http://aperocky.com/cellular-automata/
I played around a lot with cellular automata over a year ago and made the general case for game of life [1] but also other variants [2] and [3] which I consider especially beautiful.
People who are intrigued by Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata (CA) in general may enjoy tinkering with them in Golly [0], an open source sandbox for CAs.
The post mentions a bunch of programs for playing with cellular automatons; You can check out GarlicSim, which is my project, and it's intended for simulations in general, including cellular automata:
Currently only Conway's Game of Life is implemented, and in a crude inefficient way, but the important thing for me with this project is to build the best infrastructure for simulations such as these. For example, I give something similar to source control management for organizing different states of the cellular automata.
I think that in a year from now GarlicSim will become one of the best programs for simulating cellular automata.
Conway's Game of Life has a slightly different rule set. Cellular Automata is the blanket term for things like this and there are a pretty incredible variety of rulesets.
I have fond memories of going through reams of graph paper, manually simulating Conway's Game of Life.
This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I loved to follow the evolution of gliders and other emergent phenomena. This was before the days that personal computer programs existed to do the simulation for you. It's so much more satisfying to do it by hand.
Later, I was fascinated by Conway's chained arrow notation[1], which is used to concisely represent unimaginably gigantic numbers.
Do you have any plans for future projects? Maybe a simple place where you could chart your progress?
I think one of my favorite uses of cellular automata besides conway's game of life (if you are interested in it) is modeling simple fluid mechanics (water flowing from place to place) in games like dwarf fortress http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
It's a cellular automaton showing complex behavior emerging from very simple rules.
Through especially crafted inputs you can simulate a Turing machine or Conway's Game of Life inside itself.
I know Conway was slightly resentful that game of life overshadowed some of his other work in the public's imagination, but I've always been entranced by it.
I remember as a child the first computer my family had was a dual boot of Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.1 (or something like that?). On the Windows 3.1 side was a version of Conway's Game of Life which was preinstalled, and I'd spend hours messing around with it. You could place two different colors of cells, and I'd set patterns up and then let the simulation go to see which one would "win", or outlast the other.
Conway's Game of Life was also one of the first meaningful things I'd programmed, and even today I like to reimplement game of life when learning a new langauge. Typically I like to let the user assign different colors to the grid, and have new cells born be a blend of all of their neighboring colors as a kind of simulation of natural selection. Right now I'm learning network programming for game development, and I'm finishing up a networked implementation of game of life so multiple people can join and manipulate a running simulation. In general I think it's a good project to use when playing around with learning something new.
I just really like cellular automatons, and game of life in particular.
This reminds me also of Conway's game of life. I love those kind of automata systems.
I did an implementation of it a few years ago (it's pretty simple and bad I was just learning how to program) but it works http://www.jonathanfromgrowth.com/lifebb
you've heard of game of life, right? They've already created computers in that even simpler cellular automata world. They've even recreated the game of life within game of life...
Super interesting site. There's an interactive (javascript based) grid here - http://academo.org/demos/conways-game-of-life/ - where you can input the patterns and watch them animate over time. Never fails to entertain.
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