Creatures, a book on the making of an alife game, was reviewed on/. a while back. I gave it a read, and started daydreaming about some cool applications.
Ant farms are fun - a screen saver that shows alife creatures of one sort or another going about their lives would be fun too.
Watching colony members battle it out and evolve over generations would be tres cool.
Making the application distributed in some way, so that there is migration of your alife to someone elses pc/colony would be cooler still.
Publishing an api so that users could code their own alife would be the coolest yet. Imagine coding your own creature, spawning a few copies of it, and releasing it into the great, wide net. It could battle for supremacy on the screens of other users, and someday, one of its ancestors could wander its way back onto your screen, perhaps evolved in a way you'd scarcely recognize.
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Creatures, a book on the making of an alife game, was reviewed on /. a while back. I gave it a read, and started daydreaming about some cool applications.
Ant farms are fun - a screen saver that shows alife creatures of one sort or another going about their lives would be fun too.
Watching colony members battle it out and evolve over generations would be tres cool.
Making the application distributed in some way, so that there is migration of your alife to someone elses pc/colony would be cooler still.
Publishing an api so that users could code their own alife would be the coolest yet. Imagine coding your own creature, spawning a few copies of it, and releasing it into the great, wide net. It could battle for supremacy on the screens of other users, and someday, one of its ancestors could wander its way back onto your screen, perhaps evolved in a way you'd scarcely recognize.
Quick, someone go code it - i'd buy it.