Life Itself (ie. The Sims 3*10^-9)

Initial random state
The cell culture after about 150 generations on a custom ruleset

Inspiration

Given the theme of the great lakes this year, we saw it fit to make an educational tool that is capable of modeling the proliferation of cyanobacteria, such as those overtaking Lake Erie.

What it does

The example implements several common cellular automaton rulesets such as Conway's Game of Life and Ulam-Wurburton's to demonstrate the circular reproduction of surface dwelling algae.

How we built it

We used several frameworks to build a bloat-free high level Java API for rapidly developing simulations, including Processing, Gradle, the Groovy STL and OpenGL.

Challenges we ran into

There were a few hiccups along the way including incorrectly implementing rulesets, resulting in non-realistic situations where the reproduction or death factors for a single living cell are above 2, resulting in a chaotic system with no definite ground state.