2xCA Game-of-Life

A buttonless, menuless, text-oriented interactive applet

Contents

Introduction

This Cellular Automata applet uses the classic Conway's Game of Life rules. However, the CA world (implemented here as an arbitrary background picture) is shared by two parallel, independent, overlapping CA's.

It is an interactive applet, where control is achieved through clicking on textual links rather then by the orthodox use of buttons and menus. This enables a friendlier and more descriptive user interface, not limited by the shorthand language of button and menu captions.

You are welcome to follow the text and play with the extremely simple, absolutely deterministic and (almost) totally unpredictable Cellular Automata.

Interactive Description

 The text below describes what you can do with the applet. It is like a help file, but here the hypertext links actually perform the commands. Here is what you can do:

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 Cell Size
First, you can play with cell size. Medium cell size is probably the most suitable here, but you can set a large cell size or switch (dynamically) to a small cell size.

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 Pause or Single-Step
It is possible to Pause the CA movement anytime, and then Resume it. It is also possible to Single Step and slowly follow the CA as it evolves. When you had enough of single stepping, play continuously again. Use this single toggle command to Pause/Resume movement, stopping and re-starting action without moving the mouse.

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 Inserting Patterns
If you want, you can insert a cell pattern to revive a boring CA. Three interesting, unstable, long life patterns are available to choose from: The first is the 5-cell R-Pentomino that takes 1103 steps to settle down. Then there is the 7-cells B-Heptomino that stabilizes (if left to itself) after 148 generations. The last is the 7-cells, 173 generations Pi-Heptomino with its large, symmetrically evolving patterns.
Then you can also add any new pattern. This will place an arbitrarily selected pattern at a random location. Patterns can be added at will (disregard the the sand-watch cursor, it can be clicked any time).

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 Reset (hide) CA
Each one of the two independent CA's can be turned off without affecting the other. You have three choices: Either turn off the first CA , or turn off the second CA or switch off both

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 Change Background
The CA world can be represented by a picture. You can toggle background picture on and off.

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 Session Log
If you want to see a log of the current session activity, display the log window. To get rid of it, either hide the log window or close the window in the regular way.

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WICA - Web Interactive Cellular Automata

Wica - Web Interactive Cellular Automata - is a CA-based kinetic art idea implementing Alife technique in Internet Html pages. It is intended to support interactive web page design, by integrating a dynamic image with web page clicking events

The Wica homepage is located both under this site, and in Luigi Pagliarini's Wica site. It includes some examples of the Wica concept usage, including Domenico Parisi's homepage and Vedran Vucic's art.

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Credits

The idea of an interactive CA that is driven directly from the Html page belongs to Luigi Pagliarini whose excellent Artificial Life "Games" Homepage contains much more then games.

The first implementation of this concept was in Prof. Domenico Parisi's site , which was designed by Luigi (and I contributed the CA logo applet).

The basic CA algorithm is one I borrowed from Andreas Ehrencrona Andreas incorporated many nice tricks to increase the performance of the CA, and I enjoyed adopting the code. His beautiful CA site contains free CA code. His other site is just as beautiful.