Conway game of life flash code#
Conway game of life flash tv#

If there is less than one living cell adjacent to a living cell, it is overpopulated and dies. If there are two or three live cells adjacent to a live cell, it is survive. If there are exactly three living cells adjacent to the dead cell, it is born. Cells may reproduce rapidly or become extinct in a matter of seconds. The live or dead of the next generation cell is determined by the live or dead of the adjacent cells (in this site, “live = black, dead = white”).Ĭells go through a generational cycle, dying from overpopulation or overcrowding and giving birth to new cells.When the game starts, the board changes generations.A cell has two states: “live” and “dead”.Each cell (square) is treated as one life.There are no winners, losers, or goals in Conway’s Game of Life. Luckily, we don’t have to actually do that math, we can just fake it by getting brighter slowly for the low values and quickly for the high values.Conway’s Game of Life is a simulation game that uses a simple model to recreate the process of birth, evolution, and selection of life, invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The complicated version involves an analog input to choose a starting color between blue and green, and then a tweaking the brightnesses because LEDs get brighter linearly as the PWM increases, but your eye will perceive brightness logarithmically (an LED with twice the current only appears 150% brighter). How do we translate a byte into a 3-byte color in a way that looks good. The simple version is: 1-125 directly increased the blue value of the color, and then 125-255 decreased the blue value while increasing the red value.

This made it a little harder to track the current state of anything, but nothing a few extra arrays couldn’t fix.Īfter that, it was onto aesthetics. This meant that I could continuously calculate the next array while animating the previous change, eliminating the stutter from my program.

Instead of calculating the next state for the whole array at once, I only calculated 5 new cells at a time. By increasing the steps in the display-phase fade to 30, I was able to replace the display-phase delays with these calculations. But optimizing the math wasn’t enough, and we had to get tricky. Very little multiplication and never any division. Every cell reacts with the 8 surrounding cells, or the Moore Neighborhood, as shown in figure 1. To start with the obvious optimizations, I used simple byte math. The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is either alive or dead. But during the calculation phase, the program would visibly lag and interrupt the smooth flow of the display phase. During the display phase, the speed was fine, I even had to add delays to get the right fade between the previous state and the current state. There are two main portions of the program: Display and Calculation. Memory issues solved! Onto the speed problem. Just copy them into a temporary array whenever you need to read them and save yourself a lot of headaches. There should be shortcuts to access those values directly… but there aren’t, at least not for bytes. Memcpy_P(localNeighbors, neighborArray, 6) So I designed a new version, aiming for a system that wouldn’t reach any steady-states, and the rules are as follows: Purely because it looks cool, I wanted to use an analog state so I could blend between colors. Additionally, CGOL uses binary states – a cell is either on or off. I started with Conway’s Game of Life - but Conway’s Game of Life is only played on a square grid, and I chose to use hexagons. This was definitely the most fun portion of the project. Then I painted this array, and added WS2811 LED modules ( link, but you can find them cheaper elsewhere – search for “36mm ws2811″) to each cell:Īfter that, it was time to program. Plus, it was a fun excuse to play with the CNC. I knew I wanted some multicolored lighting, and hexagons make a cool pattern, might as well start. It’s great coding practice, perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

Conway game of life flash code#

You might think the first step would be to figure out what the end product would look like… but nah. Conway’s Game of Life is a fun simulation game, and we’re going to code it in Swift Based on 3 simple rules, we’ll see which of the pixels makes it to the next generation. Despite veering wildly offcourse throughout this build - and using almost none of the original parts – that carnage set this project underway.įirst step was to CNC the base, an array of hexagons to serve as cells beneath the surface.

Conway game of life flash tv#

About a year ago, we were smashing up a TV with Mammoth ( video) and I fell in love with the look of the broken LCD, and decided to make it into a table-top.