SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers. Different sets of parameters can give widely varying 'forms of life'. Since all parameters are real (floating point) numbers, sligh modification in parameters gives slight changes in life 'behaviour'. Some sets of parameters produces many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs (as shown on the picture). You can see 'cell' division, growth and decay.
It appears to be called not cellular but Continuous spatial automaton.
Run it for yourself:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smoothlife/
(Archive contains three executables, SmoothLife, the main program that needs OpenGL 3.0 or above and may not work on older and embedded videocards. So about older version, SmoothLifeSphere. SmoothLifeFB, FreeBasic version, should work anywhere, but is have only one hardcoded set of parameters.)
Add this line to the top of SmoothLifeConfig.txt and run the exe:
Code: Select all
2 1 10.0 3.0 10.0 0.100 0.257 0.336 0.365 0.549 2 4 4 0.028 0.147 // LDownload this file: http://reaction-diffusion.googlecode.co ... smoothlife_...
Download Ready and open the vti file: http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion
Slides showing how the rule works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII
Paper describing SmoothLife and SmoothLifeL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567
More videos by Stephan: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... ature=plcp
Original Google+ post: http://plus.google.com/1102148480597671 ... tPBhYJswAe