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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."

4 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.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  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.

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    I've had this sig for three days.
  3. 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.

  4. 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