Conway_mod_1_3
subpixel
Artist, VJ
View code
The self-organizing manner of unfolding privileges the ceaseless activity of unfolding and the generative power of information. Its rhythm is energetic. More than any other manner of unfolding, self-organization emphasizes that information and images themselves generate the infinite.
The program was created (or modified from the original, if you will) as a Java programming exercise — optimisation to improve execution speed. The only real novelty in the "art" is using the changing colours as a way to show a kind of history … and it looks pretty (sometimes) - I like the trails left by "gliders".
I've long been fascinated by the Game of Life; it has appeared in my programming adventures several times, once as a M68k assembly language program on my old Amiga 500 that directly accessed bits in screen memory and, once started, could only be stopped by rebooting … the novelty of which quickly wears thin. Good thing I saved it first! I don't know what happened to those glorious bits — perhaps they are now lost in the ether forever; only a faint impression of them lingers in my mind.
Originally based on Conway by Mike Davis
~240% performance
New cells are bright; dead cells have a reduced saturation and brightness.
Controls:
SPACE/right-click - toggle pause
click/drag - add cells
[f]ade on/off
[n]ew world (empty)
[g]rid world
[a]dd random cell
[d]elete (kill) random cell
[1234567890] - "heat" world
[qwertyuiop] - "cool" world
How does much emerge from little, complexity from simplicity? The mathematician John von Neumann, one of the architects of early electronic computers, was dogged by a related, seemingly simpler question: how do complex things persist? Why does this computer keep failing? The human brain, with its billions of unreliable components and fluctuating, fuzzy, analog signals in a rich broth, could tell jokes, recall distant memories and contemplate its own existence, even given age, alcohol, and dire physical trauma; the computer EDVAC, with a staff of thirty and exquisitely careful design and construction, failed constantly in hardware and in code, returning strange results, crashes, infinite loops, smoke. He pondered the concept of a machine that could reproduce itself perfectly, or even improve over generations, a machine with some of life's characteristics. Before his untimely death, these reflections took the form of the “universal constructor,” a set of instructions for an abstract machine operating on a thought-experiment two-dimensional grid to produce a functional copy of itself, its instructions, and its means of replication.
A few decades later John Conway, likewise a mathematician, took up the task of simplifying von Neumann's ideas, working out the Game of Life on Go boards and sheets of graph paper to express the kernel of the universal constructor: that a set of simple rules, iterated on an initial pattern, can yield results of great complexity and dynamism, complete with recognizable populations of patterns like beacons, “acorns,” F-pentominos, and gliders that can persist, travel, loop and exploit aspects of the rules over many generations. They had many in which to develop, because the Game of Life was swiftly adapted to run (in a gentle historical irony) on the new generations of computers then arriving on the market — it was often, unprovably claimed in the 1980s that more computer-hours had been devoted to running versions of the Game of Life than to any other single activity.
The Game of Life developed its own kind of life as a tradition in programming, imported into new languages and refined by many hands. Subpixel's version of the Game is in this tradition, a beautiful optimization of a prior version.
“Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine call the reintroduction of time to physics — not measured time, but lived, irreversible time — a ‘reenchantment of the world.’ This is true immanence. If time is irreversible, no law can predict the outcome of an experiment (such as life); instead, things in their particularity, and people too, bring about new states that could never have been imagined.” (p. 315)
return to the table of contents