I think it’s been a few days since I got to know about the game of life and I’ve been obsessing over it ever since. But I’m also doing a bad job of expressing WHY I’m obsessing over this game, so everyone around me just thinks I’m crazy and I’m wasting my time.
In this blog, I attempt to fix that.
Types of Systems
There are different types of system, like Linear Systems, Stochastic systems, etc. But I wanna focus on 2 important ones:
- Deterministic System
- Chaotic System
Deterministic Systems : These are the systems where, given the initial conditions, you can predict the state of the system after a certain interval of time. So, let’s say the movement of Earth around the Sun. We know that the movement of Earth around the Sun is governed by the rules of gravity. So if I know the position of Earth right now, I can accurately predict where it will be in any time in the future.
Chaotic Systems : on the other hand, differ slightly in that they are also governed by rules, but you still can’t predict their states in any time in the future. So let’s say weather. We roughly know all of the things that affect weather, like wind speed, temperature, distance from the sun and so on. So we have all the rules that govern this system. And yet, if you ask that the weather will be in your city, say 5 years from now, nobody would be able to reliably guess it.
Following me till now? I don’t have a good attention span, so I expect nobody does, But any way. Let’s know exactly WHAT the Game of Life is. It’s a cellular Automaton.
What is a Cellular Automaton?
A cellular automaton is essentially a simple model used to simulate complex systems with some rules. They have to have a grid, with cells, and those cells should have some state. And the state of each cell in the next time step is dependent on the state of its neighboring cells.
Demonstration
So, here is a demonstration of Game of Life, which I coded in python using the pygame package.
Let me explain what you’re seeing here.
All those small boxes you see there. They are called cells. Cells have 2 states, They can either be dead or alive. Obviously the live cells are represented here in yellow, and the rest are dead.
Here are the rules of the game :
- A live cell with 1 or no live neighbor dies [underpopulation]
- A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbor lives [survival]
- A live cell with 4 or more live neighbor dies [overpopulation]
- A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors comes to life [reproduction]
With only these simple rules, there are some AMAZING things you can create
The simplest (interesting) creation is that of a glider.
But you can also create a Glider Gun
Algos Expeditus 
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