As happened with other topics, long ago I wanted to write about this one: Artificial life and John Conway’s Life Game.

If you already happen to know about it or have just searched the internet, I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you something new, or maybe I am: John Horton Conway is a mathematician born in Liverpool, United Kingdom in 1937. One of his most known (and he has worked many) field are mathematic games, like Sprouts Game, or the Game of Life I’m going to explain here.

Life game is played on a reticulated board or grid that is supposed to be infinite in extension. Obviously, this cannot exist in practice, but is ok to use one large enough. Each cell of this grid is in one of two states: live or dead, represented with different colors (here white and black respectively).

This “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, needing no input from human players.

The game is turn-based. At each step (also called generation) every cell in the board is examined and its new state calculated. Finally, when all the new states are known, the board is updated.

The cell next state is calculated following 3 rules that although really simple (as it happen on most Conway’s games) can lead to surprisingly complex configurations:

These three simple rules creates a chaotic system: changing just one cell state in a configuration can lead to dramatically different results which ranges from total extinction (empty board) to stable oscillating population or even more interesting life forms.

I’ve developed a simulator for the game of life. It uses the Firefox (of which canvas), and it should work ok on every browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera…) except Internet Explorer (where the emulation is slow and rather buggy). If you’re using IE, please switch to Firefox to try it. Anyway, here you are:

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Posted by Boriel as Computer Science, Games, Mathematics, Artificial Life at 10.04 pm

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During these days of consumerism, one of the most announced stuff are videogames. Walking by a department stores, I bumped into this nice screen, which reminds me why I don’t think of Windows as a good videogame platform….

In this case, it’s a version of the Need For Speed Carbon game.

I do still preferring videoconsoles. Wii’s still sold out.

Posted by Boriel as Pictures, Games at 8.04 pm

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It happened by 1984. I went to a local store to buy my first ZX Spectrum Game. My Spectrum had 48K (the 16K version was cheaper and expandible to 48K, but soon dissapeared since everyone bought the 48K one; 16K memory was too little even for that time).

So I entered the store and reached the 3rd floor (computers & videogames) and saw it behind the pane: Alchemist.

Posted by Boriel as Games, Vintage computers at 4.49 pm

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To me, 8 bits computers have something that marked deeply many of us forever. This is what a friend of mine, PookyII, tells about it:

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Posted by Boriel as Games, Vintage computers at 6.54 am

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Interesting, this free (as in Beer) version of Plasma Pong - Final Prototype, via Fresqui (a Spanish Digg clone).

I gave it a try, and found it really interesting. You not only play the classic pong. This time you do it into some kind of fluid, and not only have to dump the ball, but also can hold it, or repel it propelling a fluid stream, that can return the ball back to your opponent in an umpredictable trajectory.

The program requires some CPU power, since it calculates fluid mechanics in real time, using OpenGL. The pictures are somewhat neat, as shown below.

Posted by Boriel as Games at 5.54 pm

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