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#smoothlife#cellularautomata#conway'sgameoflife

SmoothLifeL

Tim Hutton

1.1K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2022.
  • Linked in the descriptionarXiv 1111.1567

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

312K views14 years ago4 recommendations

Computer scienceGraphics and audioCreative codingAlgorithms

A demonstration of SmoothLifeL, a continuous generalization of Conway's Game of Life that uses floating-point values to simulate fluid-like gliders and structures.

SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers. This rule is SmoothLifeL which supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Run it for yourself: sourceforge.net/projects/smoothlife/ Add this line to the top of SmoothLifeConfig.txt and run the exe: 2 1 10.0 3.0 10.0 0.100 0.257 0.336 0.365 0.549 2 4 4 0.028 0.147 // L Or download Ready( code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion) and open the included pattern: Patterns/smoothlife_smoothlifeL.vti Slides showing how the rule works: youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII Paper describing SmoothLife and SmoothLifeL: arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567 More videos by Stephan: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL69EDA11384365494&feature=plcp Original Google+ post: plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/WtPBhYJswAe Details: Outer radius: 20.0 Radius ratio: 3.0 Birth range: 0.257 - 0.336 Survival range: 0.365 - 0.549 Alpha_n (outer sigmoid width): 0.028 Alpha_m (inner sigmoid width): 0.147 Timestep: 0.05 (Euler integration) Frames: 10819 (saving 1 image per 8 timesteps) Total time units elapsed: 4327.6 World size: 512x512, with toroidal wrap-around. Color representation: linear mapping of [0,1] onto [black,white] Computation time: 74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460. That's in Ready and for a high quality version. For viewing it runs in realtime. Stephan's software (at the sourceforge link above) runs much faster because it uses FFT.

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating evolution of cellular automata into the continuous domain.

sandworm101on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video]”

Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers." link to this video link

TazeTSchnitzelon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Show HN: HTML5 Game of Life in 24-bit RGB”

24 parallel games combined in a way indecipherable to normal human eyes isn't terribly interesting to me. I find SmoothLife more interesting: link to this video

kjeetgillon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Show HN: Yagol, a Game of Life sandbox built with React.js”

If you're mesmerized by the "Game of Life" like I am your going to enjoy the Continuously Domain versions like smooth life. Check out the video0, and an implementation in python1 on HN. 0: link to this video 1: link

yesenadamon Hacker News • Recommends

On “29-year-old Conway conjecture settled”

…link Noether's theorem comes up frequently - that every symmetry of the system corresponds to a conservation law.6 Smooth Life is Stephan Rafler's very cool version of CGOL with every discrete aspect turned into a continuous one.7 0 link 1 link link 2 link 3 link 4 link 5 link 6 link 7 best video of SmoothLife link to this video link This slideshow by Rafler contains the best, most complete explanation of it I've found: link Shadertoy version link…

u/drummyfishin r/compsci • Mentions

On “Are there any other fun or interesting "Games" or algorithms like the "The Game of Life"?”

So many interesting things in this thread. Here are some interesting ones I know of: * game of life implemented in game of life * continuous version of game of life * rock paper scissors * cellular automata database * substrate algorithm

tim_huttonon Hacker News • Mentions

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

Original post: link Technical details on the YouTube page: link to this video (Two lots of source code available: Stephan's and mine) Other discussions about this: Reddit: link Metafilter: link

hughlomason Hacker News • Mentions

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

Good job. Any idea why using the parameters specified in the video description of link to this video do not seem to replicate the output of the video? link I tried the same parameters in the version downloadable at link and it did not seem to produce similar output to the video either.

cmaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Alan Turing’s chemistry hypothesis turned into a desalination filter”

If you are familiar with Conway's game of life, there is also "smooth life" which uses turing style reaction-diffusion equations: link to this video

wolfium3on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Self-Reproducing Cellular Automata”

(not directly related to the article) The cellular automata in the article is a discrete one. For those interested, there are also "continuous" automata link to this video .

bioplasticon Hacker News • Mentions

On “ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program”

Reminds me of SmoothLife. Generalization of Conway's "Game of Life" to a continuous domain - SmoothLife (Stephan Rafler) link Video of SmoothLifeL: link to this video

muth02446on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lenia – Mathematical Life Forms (2018) [video]”

Also: link featuring the seminal paper by Stephan Rafler and Tim Hutton's video link to this video link featuring a more recent variant