Hi everyone,

I'm aware that this has been attempted before but here's my take on implementing Conway's Game of Life using data structures. It's resizable and has outlets for values which I think are meaningful. The initial state is set by clicking some cells, and new cells can be added or removed at any time and will be included in the calculation for the next generation. It works with Pd 0.47.1 vanilla although it uses some abstractions from list-abs.

One hiccup with this implementation is that the bigger the gird the slower it is at updating the cells, so much so that for some big size/high speed combinations it's very sluggish indeed and borderline unusable, despite cpu levels being close to zero. I suspect this is due to the constant update of lots of scalars, but I have no experience with this.

UPDATE: the latest working patch v2.0 is a few posts down

A big thanks to @Jona who's helped me developing this, as well as everybody else who's given me advice on the topic. I've got to say that for a first project with data structures I definitely could've gone for something simpler, but I'm happy with the way it's turned out and I've learnt a lot.

@ingox i like 1.1b. now its even faster. when it iterates a 16x16 grid every 20ms i have cpuload of approx. 20% edit: seems it was my imagination with the better performance. nevertheless, i think its very smooth since v1.1.

@Jona i only changed the things i mentioned in the post, nothing about the performance...

@ingox my mistake, still very good changes

@ingox Thanks for your suggestions, I've implemented your mods from 1.1b. I didn't know that struct outputs other messages than click. I think I understand the thing with gop scaling, basically instead of scaling the cells, they just get bigger and then get resized only graphically by the gop. that's clever, but unfortunate that you need to have the 1 pixel overlap. Good to know about dirty 0 as well.

I'm trying to implement other messages for loading and saving seeds as well as introducing various kinds of randomness, but I think I've messed up the patch, and also realised there are some redundancies and things that don't make sense. I will post the updated version once I can get my head together to fix it.

@weightless very nice abstraction. looking forward for the update

Here is an update with a bunch of new messages for randomisation. More explanation in the help file. The open function doesn't work but I can't figure out why, might be something trivial but I probably got enough of this thing for a while. If anyone has any idea how to fix it that would be great.

conway1.22.zip

EDIT: uploaded new zip with the missing abstractions

@weightless i changed the opening mechanism a little, now it works. a strange behaviour is that the borders of the open and save message stayed bold after opening or saving a file. for open i solved it with a short delay, for save it doesnt work so far. if using a bang button instead of a message it works like usual. ps.: very nice random possibilities conway 1.22b.zip

another game of life sequencing attempt: conway 1.22c.zip

here is a nice collection of game of life objects, perhaps the 3d objects are useful for mapping several sounds or other parameters: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Life?uselang=de and here are some examples of existing musical implementations:
http://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece5760/FinalProjects/f2011/lba36_wl336/lba36_wl336/index.html
http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/GLVpE3LbDUTbzs1eNYPVjqdtPYK299o6uu1CFDvWhhGSQ7VAfC
http://grantmuller.com/projects/game-of-life/

Here is a new version of the patch with some fixes, including the open fix by @Jona. Now the response from the messages is faster and they all work properly. Also now the "add", "remove" and "swap" messages retrive the state from the data structure rather than from the last state list. What happened before was that if you for example clicked on "add" and then "swap" consecutively before iterating, the "swap" would affect the state prior to the "add" modification.

The idea behind the various random possibilities is to be able to provide some changes automatically when the system gets stuck, for example by shuffling, adding or removing some cells after the output number of live cells hasn't changed for, say, 10 generations, or something like this. I think that this, together with the more general randomisation option, should help in getting past what seems to be the main disadvantage of this particular rule set, which is that it's rather unpredictable to know how many generations it will last before it settles into a static configuration (or into emptiness).

conway2.0.zip

@Jona Thanks for the links, I think some of the shapes in the first link refer to a slightly different variation of the rule set. That of course could be implemented as well I think, as well as other rule sets for 2d automata beyond the game of life, but that might be another patch altogether. I like what you're doing with the patch by the way

@weightless nice, everything seems to work now. one little graphical error when i open or save something is that the message borders stay bold until i use it the next time. for open i solved it with the short del, for save i didnt found a solution other than accept it or use a bang button instead. perhaps its a windows specific problem, at least it doesnt influence the functionality:

i also made a little (subjective) performance test: with a maximum of 512 squares iterated every 50ms it runs really smooth. with 1024 and the same iteration time it needs approx. 4 times the cpuload and it isnt smooth anymore, while iterated every 200ms its still good. so there are (of course) limits depending on the grid size, the metro, the computer and the number of living cells. i thought with a bigger grid it could be useful to make the graphical representation invisible, but its only a small difference in cpuload. nevertheless, i think its totally okay to live with those limits.

@Jona I see now what the delay was for, since the logic didn't really required it. That's odd, would be interesting to know what exactly causes it. I don't get that on mac by the way.

i tried to create a second voice (a third color). everytime a living cell leaves a field it creates a third color on that field if there is no new living cell. the third color is deleted directly after it is played. @weightless theres also a suggestion how to change the grid size in the help patch. i am not sure if it makes sense... conway 2.0b_test.zip

i implemented a third voice + a scale change from @weightless. the concept of the third voice is that the second voice gets transformed to the third voice after it is played. if the third voice is not deleted by new living cells the third voice disappears after it is played. (the voices send only midi values at the moment, its without soundsynthesis...) : conway_2.0e_test.zip

conway_2.0e3_test.zip @weightless now there is a switch for the voices. the mechanism is at the bottom of the guts and the seq subpatch. it works only for the stepsequencer like it should, because the stepsequencer changes the notes. for iterating and playing the whole grid every step, i think every square needs to be updated for the second and third voice. i dont know if that would be too inefficient. now its also possible to change the color of the squares with the second or third voice and the highlighted color with a mouse click. at the moment the click just changes to dark blue if its not dark blue already, you could also switch between the 4 different colors or something else. but perhaps its good to keep it simple.

nice project; i'd really like to see it, but there are some abstractions resp. externals missing in my program; e.g. the list-drip and others.

@noise list-drip is part of the list-abs library, they are not externals but abstractions made with vanilla objects. You can install the library from pd > help > find externals menu, or get them here https://sourceforge.net/projects/pure-data/files/libraries/list-abs/

Hello, I'm very impressed.

Here is a little addition I've made to the patch:
The possibility to add arbitrary shapes to the current state.
This allows you to "play" the game.

In this patch, you can't resize the
grid, but I will fix that.

conway2.0 2.zip

@Hugo-Legrand thanks, thats a great idea the limitation was the data structure gui, so i was already thinking about porting the gui to ofelia