Life....
Alas, AITC gets as confused as the rest of us when it comes to dealing with life - its big, complex, confusing. We're just humble computer folk after all....However there is a more straightforward sort of life, and this page is a demo of it.
|
|
|
The grid above lets you watch a set of cells change according to some simple rules developed by John Conway in 1970, called "Life".
| Note that currently, this grid does not display correctly on IE. It does, however, work fine on Firefox. If you don't already have Firefox installed, we'd encourage you to give it a go (and not just so you can access this page!). You can get Firefox by clicking on the button below: |
More information than you'll ever need can be found on the Wikipedia here. We highly recommend visiting this page - there's a lot of interesting things there (well, interesting if cellular automata are your thing, anyway!)
The basic idea is that cells are set and cleared on the grid according to very simple rules.
- If a cell is empty, but has exactly 3 neighbours, it will be set
- If a cell is set, and has less than 2 or more than 3 neighbours, it will be cleared.
- If a cell is set, and has 2 or 3 neighbours, it remains set.
From these simple rules, a number of interesting and complex patterns emerge. The Wikipedia has a good introduction to some of the well known ones. Some of these patterns are things like the traffic light - a row of 3 cells which changes from horizontal to vertical every turn, or the glider which moves across one cell and down one cell every 4 generations.
This page features a javascript implementation of the game of Life. If you can see the grid above, you should be able to use it. Simply click on the cells to make them set (or clear), then press either the "Step" button to go forward one turn or "generation", or the "Play" button to automatically keep going forward. The Pause button stops the "play" feature.
If you find this page and facility interesting, or you have suggestions for improvements, please let us know via the "Contact Us" link at the top of the page. Future planned enhancements include:
- More UI options to clear the board, and randomly initialise the board
- Detection of "stable" cell layouts
- A "Generation" counter so you can see how many turns the grid has gone through.
- User customisable board size
- User customisable speed
- A palette of famous life shapes, like the glider and the traffic light to enable you to experiment more easily.