The Slightly Disgruntled Scientist

My strange fascination with the Game of Life has resulted in these applets, which are more indicative of how much time I can waste than anything else. It's interesting how far it's come, given that it grew out of nothing more than a one-class implementation (a simple canvas, with its own inbuilt rules and a randomly generated starting pattern).

The Standard Game: as well as the normal Game of Life rules (ie. John Conway’s), I started tinkering with a few other algorithms. Eventually, I managed to implement a table in the GUI, so that you can modify the basic algorithm as you like. Try it. With a slight modification of the parameters, you can get some interesting effects.

The Colour Game: allowing the cells to have more than a simple on/off state is implemented by giving them colour. Consequently, there is a much greater variety of algorithms that can be used. Unfortunately, this means that it’s much harder to implement any sort of user interface to create different algorithms, so I’ve only gone halfway - I’ve created various “rules” which can be assembled into algorithms and put together a few interesting ones. Try it too.

If you really want, you can download the jar file itself, and play around with it. It runs by GUI or via command line. There’s also the source — largely undocumented and mostly experimental, but nonetheless buildable and useable.

All Java Applets require the Java Runtime Environment 5.0 or later, available from Sun.