Next-Gen Game of Life

SQL31337 writes "Jecology is a life simulator created in the spirit of Conway's Game of Life. It touches on many topics such as cellular automata, ecological balance, and the food chain. There is only one type of creature in Conway's Game of Life(CGoL). They reproduce, but do not mutate or evolve. They do not have to find food, but instead simply die based on scarcity or overpopulation. Jecology encompasses these aspects of ecology with a more complex simulation, but retains much of the elegant simplicity found in CGoL. Jecology is not merely a life simulator, but an ecology simulator. It is also an example of a complex system arising from simple rules, as described in A New Kind of Science. Screenshots and info about Jecology here."

Comments

Re:Computation?

[addaon]

I mean that the physics of the ruleset can be used to implement a universal turing machine. See this for a pre-universal example.

This means, of course, that the game of life can emulate itself. An open question (as far as I know) is whether there is a more efficient emulation method that takes deeper advantage of the rules, rather than passing through a "general computation" layer.