Conway's Game of Life

• 

  Introduction

• 

  Bigun

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  Still Lifes && Oscillators

• 

  Spaceships

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  Gosper's Glider Gun

Inspiration

I have been watching a lot of space related shows lately and common theme is unmanned space travel. Now let me explain the relation. Von Neumann probes is quite an impressive idea which proposes that best way to mine or explore space is through self replicating spacecrafts/ robots etc. Conway's game is smaller version of that with just 2 states.

What it does

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.

It's a simple game with simple rules but lot of varied outcomes. Simple rules it has:

• Any dead cell with 3 live neighbours becomes alive
• Any live cell with less than 2 live neighbours dies
• Any live cell with more than 3 live neighbours dies

Can you come up with patterns to keep the system moving?

How we built it,challenges faced and what we learned

It's built with p5.js which is popular creative coding framework. It was my first time using p5.js so got to learn a lot. I also made a Julia script to make the current version with over(20 objects ) to easy extendable. So now, All the pattern files (.cells format) available online are easy to convert for p5.js to understand.

What's next for Conway's Game of Life

More patterns and more different types of rules. And cleaner code and better documentation

Built With

• julia
• p5.js