Conway's Game of Life Playground

Description:

Go playground for Conway's famous Game of Life

This programis a cellular automata specifically a B3/S23 variant, based on John Conway's Game of Life first published in Scientific American by Marvin Gardener in 1970. Ever since, this algorithm and its derivatives have set the stage for continual development in the field.

To this day thousands of people world wide dedicate large parts of their lives researching new patterns and objects that emerge in this system and similar ones.

Basic setup

The domain or world for this program is a 2D surface which enumerates any number of rows and columns. Each cell present in the world has its own location which can be addressed by its x, y coordinates. Every cell can be evaluated to find its "neighbors", or proximally adjacent cells as per the Moore neighborhood algorith. Each iteration of the game requires the calculation for each cell, which determines the rendering for the next generation. How each cell behaves is entirely algorithmic and described in the following rules

Rules (B2/S23)

1. Any cell that has less than 2 neighbors dies
2. Any live cell having 2 or 3 neighbors survives to the next generation
3. Any cell having more than 3 neighbors dies from overpopulation
4. Any dead cell which has exactly 3 neighbors will come back online

Program-specfic variations

This program implementation has some unique features which differntiate it from the classic version.

• Music: This program uses a sinosoid funtion based on the board state and count to generate some musical notes to add some flare :)

• Scale: Users can selct a variety of render zooms for their world: macro, large, default, small, micro

• Rain: Users can optionally choose to add some stochastic progression, by defining the amount and interval for particles added to the board. For example: -rain=20 -interval=10 will add 20 random cells every 10 generation frames.

• Initial seed: Users can optionally select to begin the program using a predefined seed

Example seen here is known as a "Copperhead" and can be summoned with the -seed=copper flag. The other known seeds are:

1. blinker : Blinker
2. toad : Toad
3. glider : Glider "Spaceship"
4. copper : Copperhead
5. gosper : Gosper Gun

• Initial random cells

Here are the full list of runtime options which can be set:

$ ./conways-playground -h
Usage of ./conways-playground:
  -delay int
    	Milliseconds per frame delay (default 200)
  -init int
    	Initial random population (default 7000)
  -interval int
    	Generate rain every Cycle % X == 0 frames (default 1)
  -rain int
    	Generate random rain each iteration, set number of drops here
  -scale string
    	Scale for board: macro, large, default, small, micro (default "default")
  -seed string
    	A known seed: blinker, copperhead, toad, glider, gosper
  -sharp
    	Sharp mode disables rendering of tiles with less than 2 neighbors
  -sound
        Play some algorthmic sound with rendering

Example commands

./conways-playground -seed=copper -init=0 -delay=100 -rain=0 -interval=0 -scale=large
./conways-playground -seed=gosper -init=0 -delay=100 -rain=0 -interval=0 -scale=small

./conways-playground -seed=glider -init=10000 -delay=100 -rain=0 -interval=50 -scale=small -sharp
./conways-playground -seed=glider -init=300 -delay=200 -rain=20 -interval=10 -scale=macro
./conways-playground -seed=glider -init=10000 -delay=100 -rain=10 -interval=50 -scale=small -sharp
./conways-playground -seed=glider -init=53000 -delay=50 -rain=20 -scale=micro -sharp

Credit

Special thanks to @hajimehoshi for the Ebiten and Oto libraries, which provide gameplay and sound instrumentation to the application. The sound code in this program is largely based on their implementation.

Screenshots