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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."

18 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 Dachannien · · Score: 2, Informative

      I was, er, privileged enough to hear Wolfram speak at the Artificial Life 9 conference last year. Going in, I fully expected his head to expand to fill all available space in the room. But as it turned out, the self-ego-stroking was far less than I expected, and the only particularly ridiculous thing to come out of the talk was his unnecessary use of an acronym - NKS - which stood for nothing more than "New Kind of Science". (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. Wolfram was somewhat more reserved concerning this possibility during his talk.)

      Three mornings later, Eors Szathmary gave the featured session, helpfully and humorously noting that his talk would for our benefit remain focused on OKS. ;)

    2. 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.
    3. Re:A New Kind Of Ass Clown by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Funny

      I then go on to state how my framework will revolutionise taking out the trash and how I was in a "unique" position to develop such a framework, being that I both have trash and am responsible for disposing of the trash in our household.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    4. Re:A New Kind Of Ass Clown by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Informative

      I tried some variations such as having them stop eating when the population of their prey gets too low. They still manage to extinct themselves eventually. If I get past Z, it just keeps going into higher characters.

  2. Re:Computation? by addaon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    I've had this sig for three days.
  3. Re:Computation? by SQL31337 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I hope you know that I'm currently getting geared up to spend endless hours with xlife (again), when I should be doing more productive stuff. Thanks alot, buddy. ;)

  4. I Always Wanted To Write An Evolving Game by szyzyg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. 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
    1. Re:Modern research.. by SQL31337 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  6. differential equations? by EngMedic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
    1. Re:differential equations? by blancolioni · · Score: 2, Funny

      This is slashdot, where the immediate response to just about anything is to whine.

      In an attempt to be more constructive, I hacked it a bit so that mature As now occasionally produce a B offspring, which seems to give a more stable ecology, although Ms always starve to death, and I feel sad about that because they look so noble.

      I shouldn't anthropomorphise letters, but hey, I used to play Rogue ...

      Pretty diversion!

    2. 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

  7. A's or B's should eat "dead" everthing elses by DarrinWest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Neat. by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
  9. Re:Computation? by Jackmn · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is *far* too enjoyable knocking out a couple cells on that and watching the entire thing collapse =/

  10. Evolution of ethics by Flyboy+Connor · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The first time I encountered work like this was in A.K. Dewdney's column "Simulated Evolution" in Scientific American, May 1989. He presented the program "Palmiter's Protozoa", of which a nice implementation can be found here.

    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.

  11. 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).