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Next-Gen Game of Life

Posted by timothy on from the now-with-death dept.

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."

5 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. A New Kind Of Ass Clown by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even when people like Ray Kurzweil actually take Wolfram's work seriously they conclude that he's written the biggest book about nothing to ever lay claim to the title of Science. Nothing "new" or worthy of the title of "science" came out of Wolfram's 10 year hiatus into cellular autonoma. Certainly nothing useful or enlightening either. However we did get to tolerate his smug superior "I invented the universe" style for 1488 pages.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:A New Kind Of Ass Clown by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The book goes on to suggest that this new kind of science, which is not much more than Yet Another Computational Model, would revolutionize a wide variety of scientific fields.

      No, what Wolfram claims in the book is that he developed a framework by which other scientific fields will be reshaped. The key part of a framework is that the actual work part has been left to somebody else. I love this bullshit, you can tell can't ya? I like saying to my prewife that although I havn't taken the trash out today, by stacking the empty milk bottle near the overflowing trash can I've developed a framework for taking out the trash.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Modern research.. by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I don't want to knock anyone hacking on code, but hasn't this been done? We've been using genetic algorithims and studying emergent behaviour for a while now, and there are some very advanced code bases out there.

    I like the eye-candy aspect of it, though. Maybe you could port it to OpenGL. :-)

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  3. Re:differential equations? by StrawberryFrog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    complex behavior from a simple model? That just sounds like a parameter-sensitive system of differential eqations.

    There are other ways of getting complexity from simple rules. Can the mandelbrot set be generated with differential eqations?

    --

    My Karma: ran over your Dogma
    StrawberryFrog

  4. Re:Maybe in a few years they could create a game.. by barawn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    SimLife is a better analogy.

    I actually own the original DOS version and still have the manual and everything. One thing SimLife teaches you is that it's really hard to build up a complex ecology in a confined space. If you use the smaller maps, it's almost impossible to get carnivores to survive. There's simply not enough room for them. If you use the largest maps, I've been able to get some stable carnivore populations, but not a ton.

    Fruit trees are also darn difficult to get to spread (because they require animals), whereas grasses are very easy (as they spread on the wind).