Rules Rule
Added 2022-03-11 17:46:45 +0000 UTCWelcome back! To another week of the...
πΈπ TODEPOND TIMES πΈπ
What's new this week?
Rules Rule
Amazing news! I finally got rules working in the CellPond engine! This means you can now drag & drop colours to make stuff happen. You can make a falling sand element... or a flying rocket... or a flashing explosion thing... and lots of things. I've been having a lot of fun with it already!
Because of this, I've now started recording clips for the next video - π€ Nothing! There are still some more advanced features I need to finish, but we're very much in the finishing-up stage now!
You can try out CellPond at cellpond.cool if you want. But be warned! It's very buggy still (and doesn't support touch screens yet). I've posted up some clips of it in action, if you want to see how it works!
Game of Living
I'm trying to get ahead-of-the-game by preparing for the next-next-video (ie: the one after the next one - β¨ New Cellular Automata).
For the video, I've made my own parody/variation/twist of Conway's Game of Life. I call it... the Game of Living!
If you don't know how Conway's Game of Life works, imagine a huge grid of squares. Each square is either alive or dead. The squares change depending on some simple rules:
πΈ If a dead square is 'next to' 3 alive squares, it changes into alive.
πΈ If an alive square is 'next to' less than 2 alive squares, it changes into dead.
πΈ If an alive square is 'next to' more than 3 alive squares, it changes into dead.
This repeats again and again and again, and remarkably... it produces some cool+complicated patterns!
My version of the Game of Life changes one thing β‘ what "next to" means. In Conway's Game of Life, it's the 8 surrounding neighbours. They form a square-shaped 'neighbourhood':
β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬
β¬π¦π¦π¦β¬
β¬π¦π©π¦β¬
β¬π¦π¦π¦β¬
β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬
In my variant, I use a diamond-shaped neighbourhood instead:
β¬β¬π¦β¬β¬
β¬π¦β¬π¦β¬
π¦β¬π©β¬π¦
β¬π¦β¬π¦β¬
β¬β¬π¦β¬β¬
This basically has the effect of 'rotating' the Game of Life pattern! If you turn your head to the side, you can 'see' Conway's Game of Life on a slant.
I'm looking forward to making more variants of historic cellular automata! And making a video about it all!
Thank you very much for supporting and joining me this week. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you have a great weekend and week! See you next time! πΈπ
