
Show HN: A variation on GoL with fertility/mortality based on the age of cells - samuellevy
https://samlev.github.io/LIFEAsWeKnowIt/
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klenwell
I'm not seeing any of the patterns[0] (e.g. gliders) you see in the original
game. It just looks like noise. Which is, in some sense, Life as I know it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Exampl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Examples_of_patterns)

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alanbernstein
This is my favorite part about the classic game. Many more people have
experimented with the old one, though, most of the patterns in that may not
have been clear early on either.

Regardless, there is something to be said for the simplicity of the classic
rules.

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tgb
Can you describe the rules of the system? Most of the colors I see at the
start go away quickly and never come back so I'm not sure what's going on.

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samuellevy
The rules are a bit more complex than the original, but I'll try to summarise
them.

* An empty cell has a chance to breed if there are two or more neighbours of breeding age (10-65).

* The chance of breeding slightly decreases for every neighbouring cell that's over 35 (the older they are over that age, the lower the chance of breeding).

* All cells have a small chance of dying on any turn.

* Cells that are "children" (under 6) or "elderly" (over 65) have an increased chance of dying, depending on how young or old they are.

* Young and old cells have an increased chance of dying from loneliness (less than 2 neighbours), which increases based on how lonely they are.

* "Adult" cells (6-65) have an increased chance of dying from overcrowding (4+ neighbours), which increases based on how crowded they are.

Unlike the original game, there's an element of randomness in the ability for
a cell to breed or die, which means that it's not a repeatable simulation in
the same way that regular GoL is.

I started the rules relatively close to societal norms (breeding from 16-45),
and found that nothing could breed enough to sustain the population for long.
I thrn tweaked the rules to their current set just to get populations to at
least hold. You can get some more interesting patterns if you play with the
death limits, but I haven't spent too much time looking for the perfect rules
yet.

Pretty much all the limits are changable through the constants at the top of
board.js.

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tgb
Cool. It might be fun to let people adjust the parameters with some sliders!

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falcolas
Interesting how very few cells every stick around long enough to grow old, and
those that do are almost immediately replaced but die off before they can age.

