3D Cellular Automation (3D Conway's Game Of Life in html5/JavaScript) | Hacker News Reader

3D Cellular Automation (3D Conway's Game Of Life in html5/JavaScript)

gameoflife.samuellevy.com

26 pointssamlev9 comments

All of the examples that I tried reached steady state extremely quickly. 2D game of life can often go for quite a while before reaching steady state.

I do not know if this is because the rule used for 3D isn't very good, or if this is a problem with all rules for 3D games like this. It is actually very hard to find good rules that don't just explode or die off or reach steady state quickly.

Searching for "better rules of life" was a project of mine a while back, and I looked at all possible rules for 2D that are of the same format as the standard except using 5x5, and although I did find some that had better stats for not reaching steady state/exploding/etc, none had that "character" of conway's game of life of unpredictability, it really is a remarkable game.

Did you write a paper for this because I would love to read it

I did, but it was long time ago, and not that good. I don't think have it anymore either...

Yeah, the rules don't scale as well as I would have liked. I started with scaled rules based on the original rules: Loneliness: sqrt(1)^3 = 1 Breed: sqrt(3)^3 = 5.196152423 = 5 Overcrowd: sqrt(4)^3 = 8

That didn't work out so well, so with a little trial and error, I came to the final: Loneliness: 2 (having 1 caused checkerboard walls everywhere) Breed: 3-5 Overcrowd: 8

In due course, I plan to build in some form of "editor" because currently it just randomly places squares. I think that if you can specifically place some squares, it might produce some more interesting patterns.

Turns out I had a minor bug in my logic. Fixed it, and returned to the original rules: 1, 5, 8.

It tends to either die out quickly, or bloom and take up most of the grid.

It also runs a lot slower now.

Cool, it would be neat if you could allow user to control the values for the rules.

Another friend has been bugging me to make a slider/some other control for the rules.

It may happen. It'll probably be behind a level/position editor, though.

Strange coincidence, but I was playing with the idea of a 3D game of life a few weeks ago and put the quick-and-dirty project up on GitHub. https://github.com/jl2/LifeAutomata

One interesting version I came up with was to have the 2D version "grow" upwards: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6461000807_8c06428bb1_b.j...

I remember having similar scaling problems with the "real" 3D version, but don't remember off hand if I came up with a solution.

I had spoken to someone else who had added "time" as a third dimension (and I suppose that that's pretty much what you've done there, too).

I have, in my head, some interesting shapes that I think might react well given the rules I have. I might put a few of them in and see how they go.

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