The invention of this game made John Conway instantly famous, and kicked off the study of cellular automata. It’s conducted on a grid of spaces, where each space can either be occupied by a critter or vacant. Here’s the rules:
- Any critter with fewer than two live neighbors, becomes lonely and dies.
- Any critter with more than three live neighbors is overcrowded, and dies.
- Any critter with two or three live neighbors continues to live.
- Any empty space with exactly three live neighbors will birth a critter.
Lots of folks are excited by the Game of Life because from such a simple set of rules, complicated and fascinating patterns emerge. Also because the game has been proven to be capable of computing anything that a computer can compute.
Speak now or forever hold your peace:
The previous version I tried was blank on my Win2000 machine. This version “seed” makes circles come up, but then shoes GPFs.
Newest build of shoes makes this app work now, all versions I’ve tried.
Why come we can’t draw dem critters I wonder? pokepoke* ;)
very nice !!
Well it ran on vista for a short while, and then crashed. On the first time through, I could click seed and start it, which worked fine, but if I tried to adjust anything I get the helpful message that “shoes has stopped working.” I remember doing this project in my first CS class(Java) and it taking me days to complete. The Shoes code makes it look so easy!
todo: This app’s background is not its intended dark blue color anymore, in more recent Shoes builds for OS X. it was fine early on.
Blue background, nothing happens? (Mac, Tiger)
A very pleasant Game of Life, really nice ! I’m just a bit disappointed that the boundary conditions are “walls”: periodic is much more fun ! (I tried the “Life, Fourth Try” version).
Good job BTW !
a critter. Lots of "cellular.
Although version four works well on Leopard, there’s been reports of trouble with XP and Linux. Specifically, that the screen is just blank on XP, and that while the simulation runs, clicks do not create and destroy critters on Linux.