Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/10/smoothlifel/

by icey • 14 years ago

688 94 14 years ago

jwz.org

dexter3132• 14 years ago

Awesome, but the results/behaviour (in the video) don't seem very complex like the original Conway's game of life.

canistr• 14 years ago

It does seem more "organic", if you will.

reginaldo• 14 years ago

Lifelike might be the term you're looking for... :)

dexter3132• 14 years ago

It does. Still I think the point of game of life is not to look organic but to make complex thing from very simple rules. Like supposedly the universe we live in. Conway's game of life would look organic if you zoomed out enough, no computer can do that of course.

dllthomas• 14 years ago

Right - can you still build a UTM in this?

finnw• 14 years ago

If you could, I imagine that the hard part would be proving it correct.

brilee2• 14 years ago

It seems to have much simpler behavior - gliders, bridges, and bricks. Don't think we're going to discover any prime number generators with this version of Life.

dmorgan2• 14 years ago

Huh? It looks even more complex --organic even.

You don't confuse the fast rate of change in some Conway implementations (which is a detail) with actual complexity.

jonny_eh• 14 years ago

I need this as a screensaver, asap!

mmariani• 14 years ago

If you're on a Mac I guess you could hack it rather quickly in Quartz Composer using this as a starting point. http://quartzcomposer.com/compositions/135-conway-s-game-of-...

mrshoe• 14 years ago

Considering this is the XScreenSaver creator's blog, you might just get your wish.

uvdiv• 14 years ago

HTML5 implementation in 3, 2...

nuttendorfer• 14 years ago

Surely you mean "pure CSS3 implementation".

ktizo2• 14 years ago

How about doing an implementation of smoothlife in conway's life? Might run a bit slow.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Well I can't seem to find the rules, but that shouldn't be very difficult.

Might even be able to do it in a way that works without canvas.

33a3• 14 years ago

1: http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/

tisme4• 14 years ago

Fascinating, totally mesmerizing video. That's reminiscent of something that you could be observing under a microscope.

Anchor• 14 years ago

I wonder what a 3D version (http://www.ibiblio.org/e-notes/Life/Game.htm) of a continuous game of life would look like... could similar cell-like structures emerge with these kind of rules also in 3D.

mbrubeck• 14 years ago

SmoothLife has been generalized to 3D too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsEyu8Ol-Q&NR=1

jmpeax• 14 years ago

Is it Turing complete?

shmageggy• 14 years ago

I'd bet it is, but I imagine it would be really hard to prove. The original turing-completeness proof [1] for discreet cellular automata worked by setting up some predictable repeating patterns and then using these to encode a representation of some other simple machine that was known to be turing-complete. Getting anything repeatable out of this would obviously be much harder, as any slight perturbation would cause unpredictable effects (see: chaos theory). However, I haven't read the paper so maybe they have some way of setting up the system that enables repeatability.

1. http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-1-1.pdf

jrl• 14 years ago

It looks like cells under the microscope. Very interesting stuff.

teamls• 14 years ago

Hey guys, check out the Conway's Game of Life Code Garage project on LearnStreet: http://www.learnstreet.com/cg/simple/project/conways

waqf4• 14 years ago

I'm not logging in with Facebook to see your site, about which I know nothing, when you haven't even sold me on its relevance to the topic under discussion.

pests• 14 years ago

Did you, um, click the links at the top?

pav3l• 14 years ago

Aren't cellular automata in continuous space just PDE's? If so, what is the equation being integrated?

EDIT: found the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.1567v2.pdf

brilee2• 14 years ago

Not quite; the values at every point are boolean, not floats.

(From the link) The algorithm is explained here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII

waqf4• 14 years ago

It's confusing because several algorithms are explained, but I believe they're actually floats in this version.

Also it's not a normal PDE because ∂f/∂t is permitted to be an arbitrary functional of f restricted to a fixed-diameter neighborhood of the point, not just an infinitesimal neighborhood.

tim_hutton7• 14 years ago

Original post:

https://plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/WtPBhYJs...

Technical details on the YouTube page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I

(Two lots of source code available: Stephan's and mine)

Other discussions about this:

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/118svz/smoothlife_a...

Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/120749/Smoothlife

rm9992• 14 years ago

Very cool, thanks for the links! Are you affiliated with the project?

tim_hutton7• 14 years ago

I made an implementation of SmoothLifeL in Ready and this video. Stephan Rafler created the SmoothLife rules and has his own software. Ready is designed to let the user play with a large range of systems like this one, connecting a field of floats to an OpenCL kernel that the user can rewrite on the fly. Check out Ready for some similar patterns, like Robert Munafo's U-Skate world.

http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion

There's a deep motivation behind all this, which is to try to understand the pattern formation mechanisms that appear in nature and get harnessed by organisms.

mmagin• 14 years ago

Possibly of similar interest - Ready, a program for exploring continuous valued cellular automata: http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion/

DanBC4• 14 years ago

Pinchyfingers submitted this link:

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628) which goes to a Youtube video of a game of life in a single line of APL. It's a really nice description of the code too. (It's a sale pitch for dynalog - but the best kind where they're just using the tool to do something neat and not pushing their URLs at you.)

mikeash• 14 years ago

I've watched that video several times and it never occurred to me that it was a sales pitch.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

That's the best kind of sales pitch. Don't sell it. Just show it. People who want it will be grateful not to have it pushed at them, and people who don't want it will watch it and share it with others, and those other people might want it.

jashkenas• 14 years ago

Does anyone have a JavaScript implementation of the paper? It looks like it would be really fun to play with in <canvas>.

Edit Quoth YouTube: "74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460" ... maybe not so fun.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

WebCL?

ghostfish3• 14 years ago

But you missed the most important part of that quote. >"(in Ready, Stephan's software at the sourceforge link above runs much faster)" So using Ready it took a long time, but the actual code is much faster. I'd imagine you could write something in CUDA that would run this (and only this, not something generalized like Ready) plenty fast to do real time rendering on a new system, especially considering a GTX 680 has almost 5x the horsepower of a GTX 460.

Admittedly not in a web browser though.

tim_hutton7• 14 years ago

Ready is using OpenCL. But Stephan is using FFT for the convolution with a disk filter, which is a big win for large radii.

maffydub• 14 years ago

"Admittedly not in a web browser though."

HTML5 gives you WebGL support, which allows you to compile and run GLSL shaders from JavaScript. For something that is heavily shader-oriented like this, it might be possible in the browser.

tim_hutton7• 14 years ago

Another thing about the 74 minutes. That was for a larger radius than necessary and a smaller timestep than necessary - for a high quality video.

With a radius of 10.0 and a timestep of 0.1 I get 186fps on the same graphics card - visually about the same speed as the youtube video.

33a3• 14 years ago

Here you go: http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/

hughlomas• 14 years ago

Good job. Any idea why using the parameters specified in the video description of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I do not seem to replicate the output of the video? http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/45/

I tried the same parameters in the version downloadable at http://sourceforge.net/projects/smoothlife/ and it did not seem to produce similar output to the video either.

jolohaga• 14 years ago

Wish the music were as interesting.

jes5199• 14 years ago

how close are the rules running here to the standard rules of Conway's Life? I know some of those are supposed to be "gliders" - is it possible to port other shapes from Life into SmoothLife?

wissler• 14 years ago

Now to try it with complex numbers and/or 3D coordinates.

tomrod2• 14 years ago

This is one of the most beautiful things I think I've ever seen simulated. Kudos!

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

Watching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is more worthy of study. There was so much controversy about the book and Wolfram's claims, that I didn't bother with it.

mck-• 14 years ago

Watching this video makes me wonder if Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is getting old (like Tetris).

I was actually reading that book at the book store for hours, getting quite intrigued, but at the same time deterred by its size. Perhaps I should give it another shot some day.

andolanra2• 14 years ago

The general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has some interesting results (e.g. that Rule 110 is Turing-complete) but a lot of the work is summary or rehash of other extant (and often non-cited) material. There are often more thorough, more concise, and more lucid resources on cellular automata from other research; I'd cite Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) off the top of my head for a work that comes to many of Wolfram's conclusions several decades prior to Wolfram.

In fact, a good strategy for becoming familiar with cellular automata as a field is to read reviews of ANKOS by people with degrees[1], collect the works and authors mentioned, and trawl them. You'll learn a lot about a lot that way.

[1] http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html has an extensive selection of such reviews.

EDIT: It's also worthy of note here that Wolfram would reject the original post's model as not worthwhile, as ANKOS explicitly argues that we should reject continuous models in favor of discrete models; indeed, that is the very definition of his "new kind of science."

kriro2• 14 years ago

I own the book and have read most of it (not deeply). I'll need to actually study it and have reserved a decent time slot for that next year.

I think the concepts are fascinating but the representation is somewhat meh. Wolfram seems to be quite fond of himself. That ebing said I don't understand why people would not want to read the book because they "don't like" Wolfram.

I recommend it to anyone really it got me thinking about some pretty interesting ideas. Just be open minded and treat it as a "creative tickler" and not a ridid new science :)

nickknw• 14 years ago

That's awesome! My project inspired by the Game of Life is quite a bit less ambitious (and still incomplete) - http://nickknowlson.com/projects/conways-revenge/

It lets multiple cell colonies fight against each other using a modified ruleset.

jmilloy• 14 years ago

Cool! I've been wanting to do this for some time and haven't gotten around to it.

kasra• 14 years ago

Have you googled "conway's game of life" recently?

antimora• 14 years ago

Yes. Google has nice animation =)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Conways+Game+of+Life&sug...

jcromartie• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this is as cool as it looks. I guess it's yet to be seen what the larger-scale behavior might be, but it looks like it's just a lot of the same gliders, orbits, and strands between them.

Pitarou• 14 years ago

Someone's gonna package this up and sell it as a product, for sure! A 21st century lava lamp.

kriro2• 14 years ago

This is fantastic both intellectually and from an artistic point of view.

I'm not a fan of electronic music but the music that was picked for the video was perfect.

Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

Related Stories