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Another well known cellular automaton is Conway’s Game of Life, not to be confused with Hasbro’s Game of Life, which costs £9.99 and is nowhere near as interesting. In the 1970s the field of Computer Science was obsessed by this exercise. Super-computers were employed to churn through iterations of the game over periods of weeks. Today it can be simulated in the 5k Flash file embedded below. Click start to see it in action:

(technical note: while this is only a lightweight file, it can hog the processor quite a bit while running, so apologies if you have a slow machine)

Again, the basic algorithm is extremely simple. As with the Vichniac Vote, each cell lives or dies according to its neighbours. Rule 1: If a live (black) cell has 2 or 3 neighbours it continues to live, otherwise it dies of either loneliness or overcrowding. Rule 2: If a dead cell has exactly three neighbours it miraculously comes back to life.

Start it from a random seeding and you’ll get some idea of how patterns evolve. But try creating your own seeds (when the simulation above is stopped you can draw on the canvas with your mouse) and you can explore how your own creations survive in the game. There are many tried and tested patterns (thanks to our 70s Computer Scientist friends), open this page for a few examples to try.

Ok, so you might argue that these creations don’t really resemble anything you might call “life”, not unless you really squint – they only have form by the patterns we ascribe to them by our pattern recognition obsessed brains. But regardless, they adequately demonstrate the simple algorithm, complex result principle of Universal Automatism. And they are a nice way to waste a few hours.

Want more maths based fun? Have a play with the Cellular Automaton Toybox I’ve made.

tags: universal automatism, cellular automatons, game of life, stephen wolfram, rudy rucker, chaos theory, emergence, pattern recognition

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under flash, generative art, philosophy, tech, universal automatism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.