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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."
hey, that is some cool stuff. I was always fascinated with the game of life from my first CS days in college. Creating life! Actual life! and watching them live out their days and make families. It is fascinating!!!
I made loads of notes back when I had an Atari ST - the idea was to basically have a scrolling shooter with lots of aliens travelling around the landscape. The aliens would breed and through survival of the fittest they'd get stronger - the player would essentially be the force of natural selection....
Maybe it's time to revisit the idea.
complex behavior from a simple model? That just sounds like a parameter-sensitive system of differential eqations. Am I missing something? A "complex" ecological system (or any other system) is normally modeled well (or well enough) over a set of conditions with a linear second-order system, and if it isn't, there exist well-tested tools for nonlinear analysis for high-order systems.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Most of the life simulators I've played with (gLife comes immediately to mind) turn me off with their complexity. I was actually aiming for something almost as simple as Conway's game. The code really isn't very large. And to be honest, everyone I have shown it to in person has wound up zoning out for hours and watching it, while I try to move on to different things. They begin talking about "Cancers of D's defended by G's" while the other people around them just stare at them blankly. I really would like help on it, and I'm definitely going to port it to Open GL.
If it is a real "ecology", where is the waste recycling? When a higher level creature dies, it is a large collection of useful energy. In real life something would evolve to eat the corpse.
I'd like to see whether this sort of system would develop "lichen" (combination of fungus and algae), or other perpetuating synergies.
Have you looked at Thomas Ray's Tierra simulator? I saw results from that in the early 90s when he was at U. Delaware, and he got quite complex behaviour from a few simple rules, and a single parent organism.
One of the interesting byproducts of Tierra was that one of the first organisms to evolve was a more optimzed version (fewer instructions) of his hand made one, which then went on to give rise to parasites, anti-parasites, predators, etc.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
But this is all kid's stuff. Such experiments can be much more interesting nowadays, with the power of computers as we have now. A student of mine studied the evolution of morals in a similar society. His program isn't online yet (will be soon, I guess), but his thesis is.