supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs.
Slides showing how the rule works. Paper describing SmoothLife and SmoothLifeL.
SmoothLifeL
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers:
Tags: computers, mpegs, xscreensaver
21 Responses:
sigh And I just finished my AVR-driven LED matrix project that plays Life. rips out code, starts over
Stephen Wolfram is very angry.
Floating point numbers are still discrete. I.e. you still have only 32 or 64 or whatever bits.
So in order to make truly continuous version of Conway's Life we would have to use.... life?
Planck constant says that won't work either.
I haven't read the paper yet, but it looks like using constructive real arithmetic may yield a solution that would allow you to descretize only for rendering (ie the discretization isn't involved when building the next state).
Obviously, this doesn't solve the problem of time discretization, but I'm not a fan of ODEs and PDEs.
This needs to be in XScreenSaver
Great! But slides as video? Where is this going?
Sorry, I have outrage fatigue.
oh, the irony
Next step, make multiple kinds of units that have different rules.
Do you mean a collection of cells when you say unit, so the cells in each collection would share the same rules? What happens when the units collide, mixing the cells with the different rules!? That sounds pretty interesting!
Very nice! I have always liked the Game of Life, there are so many surprising things about it. Thank you for sharing the link to the article.
It'd be cool if someone wrote a webcrawler that found simple OpenGL projects with few dependencies and automatically ported them to WebGL.
Has anyone managed to run this under Wine?
Check out this recursive version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw
Aside from the horrible soundtrack, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 is a better video of that.
wasn't smoothlife 3D all the rave last year?
Can you make it colorful - I mean, include a color-changing logic into this? I had seen a paper a long time back in an IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications issue about including color into Conway's Game of Life.
I've seen Life colored by age to good effect.
Wow! You could make a nice 3D print using every frame as slice for your 3D model :)
If so, I hope the constants are (optionally) randomized for each instantiation.