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[slogan]This is what Grids did for us today. What can Grids do for you?[/slogan]
Today’s game is a version of Conway’s Game of Life. Yes, we know it’s a bit of a cheat… since it is not a game at all! But no exploration of play on grids is complete without a bit of cellular automata.
We at Gamelogic are big fans of Conway – not only for his Game of Life, but also the work he has done on symmetry, which sets spiritual undertones for our Grids library. He did not use a computer when he first studied cellular automata – he used a Go board! We built ours on a rhombille grid – a term coined by Conway, kind of as a tribute and because it’s cool.
Our rules are: a cell dies when it has 4 or 0 living neighbors, and it comes to life when it has 2 living neighbors.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find rules with rich possibilities. This version has a few repeating patterns (a three-node shuriken, for example), but overall patterns are quite static. We did not discover gliders or other interesting figures, although they may exist.
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