Ever since I first laid eyes on Conway’s Game of Life, I’ve been in love with the idea of cellular automatons: small, distinct units that follow some simple, fundamental rules to create beautiful, complex, and strange patterns working together.
This prototype was originally inspired by an article I read about cellular automatons, or rather, a video of an example of one somebody had created.
In 2015, I set out to recreate the example from scratch in Java (GitHub). As you can see from the example video on the GitHub page, I managed to demonstrate some very different, but equally entrancing, behaviour. There is a config file used to load the parameters which users can tweak.
Essentially, the way it works, is that there is a grid of cells, every cell is adjacent to another cell, there is no space between them and no “neutral” space, as in the linked article’s video. Each cell is in one of three states at all times. It is either “Rock”, “Paper” or “Scissors”. Each cycle, or generation, every cell is re-evaluated based on some rules.
I’ve recreated the same basic program in JavaScript (GitHub), rendering the grid onto a canvas element.