
Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence - wayspurrchen
http://www.automata.website/
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fishtastic
This game is quite different from Conway's Game of Life because it's not
deterministic. During a turn, cells will rely on Math.random to find whether
to move or divide; the direction that the cell move into is also randomized.

~~~
jones1618
I agree, you can call it cellular automata if you want but it is false
advertising to draw any comparison to Conway's Life. Still, it is fun an
interesting but I would have found it more compelling if it didn't have a
random component. That's part of the magic of Conway's life that complex
results arise out of simple, deterministic rules.

FYI: There have been many competitive versions of Life written over the years.
Here's one: (Life As War)[[http://www.ctrl-alt-
dev.nl/Projects/LifeAsWar/LifeAsWar.html](http://www.ctrl-alt-
dev.nl/Projects/LifeAsWar/LifeAsWar.html)]

~~~
jerf
"There have been many competitive versions of Life written over the years."

Mistaking "Conway's Game of Life" for "Cellular Automata in general" can
produce sub-optimal results. The same thing that makes Life so interesting is
that from its simple rules, extremely surprisingly things result. In some
sense it is in the class of maximally interesting "suprisingness" as it is
Turing-complete. But this same surprisingness and the wolly, humanly-
unpredictable way it manifests make it almost entirely useless for game
playing.

The general idea of cellular automata can be turned into game form, but you're
better off defining your own rulesets, which can produce things like
[http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/](http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/). I also remember
playing a game that actually resembles the linked page, but where each player
moved a mouse cursor around, the cells tried to follow each corresponding
player's mouse cursor, and the various blobs would eat each other. Probably
one of the most clear examples of a game I god good at (relative to my
opponents) and couldn't even begin to verbalize my strategy, even though I had
one.

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jarcane
The Powder Toy, more or less the state of the art in falling sand games now,
has a raft of Life rulesets. I found it quite interesting to pit them
together; they have no particular rules for directly interacting with one
another, but the way they take advantage of life and death and empty space
nonetheless can produce some fascinating interactions anyway.

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coyotebush
Cool to watch, though this is a fairly straightforward model of complex
contagion on a finite grid. It's similar to Conway's Game of Life in that
there's a grid and local rules, but beyond that, the nature of the rules
results in a different kind of behavior.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion)

[http://www.ladamic.com/netlearn/NetLogo4/DiffusionCompetitio...](http://www.ladamic.com/netlearn/NetLogo4/DiffusionCompetition.html)

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clarkmoody
Selfish feature requests:

+Better color scheme by default makes it easier on the eyes than full-
saturation RED, GREEN, MAGENTA +Pick from existing colors to draw new cells
+Time-series charts of per-color population counts +Draw on chart with default
pointer instead of text select +Reset to default button

Overall this is really interesting to look at. It doesn't really seem like
it's that close to Conway's Game of Life, but it's an interesting nonetheless.

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sean13013
reminds me a lot of an old multiplayer network game called "liquid war"

[http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar](http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj65vUy3rK8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj65vUy3rK8)

~~~
chrisfosterelli
I loved that game! I must've sunk countless hours playing against the AI's.
For being so simple, it's remarkably fun.

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pervycreeper
Offtopic, but ".website" is pretty much the worst TLD conceivable.

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tomrod
Why so?

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pervycreeper
If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

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eru
So it's the same as www in front?

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kolev
I disagree. "www" (just like ".com") denotes a URL. Something.anything doesn't
look like an address unless you put "[http://"](http://") in front, which is
too technical for most people. I think "www" and ".com" are here to stay.

~~~
e12e
"www" is generally taken to mean (world-wide-)web server (as opposed to ftp,
gopher, telnet, smtp, imap or just "mail" server). So you could say needing
both "http(s)://" and "www" is redundant.

Similarly, [http://ftp.company.com](http://ftp.company.com) is a bit of a
misnomer -- if it was an ftp server, you'd have to use "ftp://" \-- but of
course a single host might run several different daemons, or a daemon might
speak several different protocols.

I can appreciate that for many people "www" and ".com" 'denotes a URL', and
also agree that without context, "Something.anything" doesn't really look like
an URL. I fail to see how that's a problem within the context of hypertext
(where the expected behaviour is clicking a link).

[Ed:spelling]

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Argorak
[http://ftp.company.com](http://ftp.company.com) makes perfect sense. It is
the http listing of the files stored on the server, linking to the actual
files served using FTP. FTP isn't made for dynamic content and the file list
is just that. The main role of the domain is FTP serving, though.

~~~
kolev
Good example!

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lettergram
Seems as if pretty much every state is a steady state. Would be interesting if
some were predators and others prey, with some feature that allows them to
"starve"

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DennisP
Watch longer. I drew a small block of pink and it took over a quarter of the
board, then red swept everything.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time rooting for pink.

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erikb
I coded nearly the same game as a Java desktop application in 2009. Can't find
the binary anymore though. It's lots of fun if you can tune some parameters,
like make one species more fertile (reproduces every time, while others
reproduce only 50% of the time into empty space, etc), more aggressive (can
consume when surrounds an enemy from only two sides), or more strategic (tries
to make sure not to get its fighting line broken up by a lucky enemy).

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lettergram
I made a video on how to "win" at Automata with minimalist moves:

[http://youtu.be/hQhXFHmXDaA](http://youtu.be/hQhXFHmXDaA)

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lkrubner
The big surprise to me is that stability is possible in this game. Most of
these games end in less than 60 seconds. The first several games I let run had
unstable dynamics: one side gained an advantage and grew and grew until it
took over the whole board, usually in less than a minute. But later, through
experimentation, I found that stability is possible.

The corners seem to be especially stable. I waited until the game had
consolidated to 3 colors, then I created 4 new colors and added them to the
corners (I slowed the game down to 500,000 milliseconds so I could have time
to paint the corners, then I went back to 30 milliseconds). With 4 corners
held weakly by 4 colors, and 3 large colors holding the center, the game is
remarkably stable. I watched it, in the background, for several hours. One of
the corners disappeared, but the other 3 corners held on. I went off to bed.
In the morning, 2 more of the corners had been swallowed, but 1 of them still
survived. These 4 surviving colors have been battling now for over 24 hours.
The game has reached equilibrium.

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a_olt
Hmm in some scenarios the colours would really benefit from forming an
alliance... :) It's fun to watch how different stories unfold.

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lettergram
If you put a 4 x 8 purple block in the center of each color, the outcome will
always be purple taking over the entire map. It seems like a fairly complex,
and similar tactics in Go can achieve victory (victory being purple overtaking
the map).

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javra
That could be true, I won everytime I played the purple stones in Go.

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arjie
Interesting. In this simulation, fighting on multiple fronts is optimal
because then no single enemy can surround you. Funny. Leads to drawing along
the borders being more significant than drawing within a solid colour block.

~~~
lotharbot
Interestingly, being surrounded (the 4x8 rectangle others have posted about)
is much stronger of a position than I expected. I thought my 4x8 rectangles
would be quickly consumed, but instead they expanded into enemy territory.

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Robadob
Sugarscape is another interesting cellular automata model.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarscape](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarscape)

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luismarques
I implemented sugarscape some years ago and my findings contradicted the
thesis of the book; instead of having some robust emergent results (like a
Pareto distribution of wealth, IIRC), the results presented in the book could
only be produced by carefully tweaking some parameters of the simulation.
Furthermore, when implementing sugarscape I realized that the book didn't even
specify what values were used for those parameters. While that shouldn't
matter if the effects were robust, they were not. Unfortunately I don't
remember the exact results, but I hope to look into this again when I have
more free time. In sum, I thought the book was very interesting, but was quite
disappointed when I tried to replicate (and extend) the experiments. Such is
science... :-)

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toxik
There is something wrong with the game, the sum of the number of cells of each
color is not constant.

Also it for some reason got almost impossible to paint the board one color;
beginning was easy enough. A splash was enough. Somehow the "end-game" is
nearly impossible to complete. The very frustrating input method does not help
the least.

Otherwise, nice idea!

~~~
soganess
Is: "Cells surrounded by three or more cells belonging to the same opponent
are consumed", not the reason for the non-constant # of cells?

I imagine that is the author's language for the fact cells get captured and
turned. In fact, I don't see how it would possible for the # to stay constant;
how would anyone color ever "win"(take over the board) if such a requirement
was maintained?

I also may not be correctly following your questions logic...

~~~
sejje
There are xxxx number of cells.

The number displayed in each color block on the left is like a score, the
number of cells it has.

Adding together those numbers != xxxx.

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rileyjshaw
Ooh! Awesome :)

I've got some similar demos for rileyjshaw.com/terra that I haven't thrown up
yet, I'll see if I get a chance to this week. One fun advantage of doing this
in Terra is that it supports periodic boundaries (meaning that there aren't
any "safe" edges)

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hetid
The same effect could be achieved by taking a low resolution image and each
turn, making each pixel the color of a random neighbor. The only thing this
has to do with the Game of Life is both can be simulated by copying one array
to another and applying some simple rules.

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jonahrd
It would be a neat feature to allow us to upload an image of the right size as
a seed for the game

~~~
ChrisGranger
That's a nice concept. Seeing how various seed images play out could be really
interesting.

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ObligatoryRef
It's interesting dumping groups of cells into different parts of the board and
seeing how it reacts - a group in the middle of one color gets absorbed
quickly, a group along the border of several colors hangs on for much longer,
etc.

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rsivapr
Nice! I made something similar except it was more about how people are
influenced by ideas of people around them and less about violence. link:
[http://goo.gl/H0Wqxo](http://goo.gl/H0Wqxo)

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a_olt
Without pausing, just by rapidly adding pink cells at the borders between two
colours, it is possible to make one of them go extinct.

[http://i.imgur.com/q2OIJNh.png](http://i.imgur.com/q2OIJNh.png)

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infinity0
Practise starting revolutions: colour the whole board white, and see which
minimal combinations of black will eventually take over the board.

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teddyh
A bit like A. K. Dewdney’s idea of the “ _voters_ ” simluation (as seen
implemented in the old _xlockmore_ program mode “voters”).

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bbcbasic
Interesting - red got blue and green into a corner, had time to gobble them up
for itself, and then went on to defeat black!

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eatitraw
Surprisingly interesting to play and watch. I would like more tools to add
cells(mspaint-like)

~~~
johnlbevan2
Indeed; I found that trying to help a side by adding to its numbers near to
its borders typically resulted in that side dying off faster... unexpected.

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minimaxir
Every time I add (pink) cells, they are always immediately killed. Is that
intended?

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sconealone
Pause it and add a blob. My pink blob made blue go extinct ):

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flashman
Needs population count as a live graph.

~~~
bbcbasic
And an API.

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notastartup
5 minutes:

The hordes of Lime Green grow stronger every second. We face a growing threat
from the Blacks and the Blues to the east. I shall fight for a few more
minutes.

10 minutes:

We face complete annihilation from the unstoppable growth from Blacks. Lime
Green horde is nearly decimated, it was only a few minutes ago they seemed
unstoppable.

15 minutes:

Lime Green have been completely annihilated! We are caught between the epic
battle between Blacks and Blues. I rest for a few minutes.

20 minutes:

We are caught in a stalemate with the Blacks. The eastern front bears the
crushing weight of Blues onslaught of attacks and raids. The night is getting
cold, we are tired.

