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.

If we can get ride of the "last.state" text objects , and keep the list
as it, without even cuting it in rows, until it's absolutly necessary, maybe it can get faster.

Edit: It did not work. Pure data hates long lists !

Also, a switch to turn the Data structure display off would be justified, since we are generating control data for audio synthesis and sequencing

This might be a very ignorant question, but why not just use toggles for this project? You can easily set them up so that clicking on them changes the colour, which should give more or less the same effect as what you've achieved through data structures.

@LiamG not ignorant at all i think you are right, you can achieve the same result with toggles and dynamic patching. i think we even started to patch with the toggle method before discovering data structures. i think data structures are still a little bit more efficient than toggles, but maybe i am wrong. they store the graphical and the visual representation at once and they can work like an array and each field is one element of the array. perhaps they are also more efficient because they carry less information, its only a pixel at a position with a color. we were exploring data structures at that time and the graphical side of the patch is roughly based on https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/10734/vanilla-struct-sequencer that lead to https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11012/grid-multi-pattern-step-sequencer-abstraction so we already had a visual grid to base the patch on.

That's right, as far as I'm concerned this patch and the sequencer were experiments to see whether some basic graphic interfaces could be done with data structures (and believe it or not, one of the reasons for that was so you don't have to make a toggle-based sequencer every time you need one). Turns out they can, but they don't seem to be very efficient and are rather clumsy to program and with major limitations. Going forward with making these kind of interactive objects, now that there's ofelia available, I think it's kind of a no-brainer, especially for someone who has to learn either from scratch. If I'll have more time to work on the patch I will definitely consider redoing it with ofelia.

@Jona do you find that your ofelia experiments and patches run faster than data structures?

@weightless i only implemented the multislider as a more complex interface element so far, but i would definitely say yes, they are much faster because the lissajous figures are quite complex and run very smooth. of course, like data structures, they need some extra work.

@Jona Sounds great, and a lot more flexible than data structures as well. The only thing is that at first glance it doesn't look so easy to learn but perhaps I'm wrong. When I have some time I'll try it out.

Hello. It's been a few days. Finnaly I could implement the drawing space.
So that's it, we can know separatly draw shapes, then add them by clicking where desired on the grid.

First, select a rule. Then start the metro. Now you can draw.

life3.0.zip

@Hugo-Legrand Thats very nice, also that its now posibble to change the rules on the fly or sequence them. Is it that it draws the first iteration of the left pattern into the right screen? and how big is the left drawing area?

Here is a little video that shows what you can do:

@Hugo-Legrand thanks for the video, very nice. somehow it didnt work like that for me, perhaps because i had to find a library for count and creb is the wrong one? that was the only missing object. or it replaced another object with something from a different library?

count.zip

Here it is. An abstraction from the Pd-extended.43 era.

@Hugo-Legrand thanks, thats from the creb library. and i need to start the metro first

@Hugo-Legrand Very nicely done, being able to add shapes with a click is much more useful than adding single or random cells.

with the sequencing in mind it could be nice if one can draw and save starting patterns that can have several shapes or/ and a certain number of the same shape (before starting the metro). it could be more "controllable" then. perhaps it could be also interesting to rotate a single shape in 90 degree steps or mirror them? or choose from common preset patterns like still life, oscillators or space ships? just some thoughts.
here are some spaceships:

You can save a whole drawing grid full of differents patterns.

I see. But you need to draw every single Pixel, for a small grid like that its totally fine but for a bigger grid it could be nice to draw shapes instead. Of course it depends on what you want to achieve.

Ok makes perfect sense. think it woudn't be too difficulte to add the possibility to click shapes on the drawing grid. I don't have the time right now. But it's doable.

I have to admit that I am short of time at the moment, too. I will think about it when I have more time again (and also check out and learn from your neural network patch).

life3.0 2.zip

Hello, @Jona, I think this update allows you to do what you wanted to do: once you've initalised the screen, you can stop the metro, and put as many shapes as you want before putting it back on. Also, you can select some shapes you load by using the keyboard (letters a,z,e,r) .
I'm also working on an additionnal output that would emit the state of the selected point of the screen. All of this is work in progress, no clean version.