Monday, January 13, 2014

Visualization of the Game of Life

Working with visualization a bit today and needed a system to visualize, so I did the Game of Life and it turned out pretty, so I decided I should share.


The game is played in the XY plane. Older generations are moved down in Z and their color is darkened by 20%. Each system is started with random live and dead cells. The first runs are with free boundary conditions while after around 2:50 I switch to a toroidal system of size 20 in X and Y. You can clearly see gliders at several places in the video, for instance there is one at the 2:00 mark.

If you care, the simulation and visualization were all done from inside a Lisp session and takes around 90 lines of code (including blank ones) to get this effect.  The stuttering frame rate is due to the screen capturing software, RecordMyDesktop.  I'm not sure how to do this better other than grabbing the frames from the OpenGL display buffer, writing them to a bitmap file, and making my own video with FFMPEG (which is what I do for presentations).

I need to figure out how to make this a live wallpaper for my phone...

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