WiiLife

WiiLife
General
Author(s)	drei000
Type	Math(?)
Links
[[[1]|Download]]
Source
Peripherals

WiiLife is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Wii. It lets you watch a random population of cells evolve and die. You can zoom in for a better look and scroll around. If you get bored, you can create an new random population.

Due to its early stage, the program may crash once in a while, since I'm not sure that all boundaries are checked :)

About

From Wikipedia:

The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton.

The game is actually a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, needing no input from human players. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness.
  2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
  3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.

The initial pattern constitutes the 'seed' of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed — births and deaths happen simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. (In other words, each generation is a pure function of the one before.) The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Controls

Button	Action
	Move around in Zoom Mode
	Generate new (random) population
	Zoom In
	Zoom Out
	Decrease Speed
	Increase Speed again
	Quit

Screenshots

Taking Screenshots doesn't work at the moment (maybe quite useless anyways), but it looks quite similar to this, just the colors inverted:

Changelog

2008.07.26

• icon.png and meta.xml added to .zip
• Speed can now be slowed down and speed up again (starting speed is maximum speed at the moment)
• Initial pattern changed to Gosper's Glider Gun
• Fewer living cells in random populations

2008.07.25

• Initial Release / edit: resized the area where cells start so that they have some space to evolve :)

To Do

• Possibility to change starting conditions

• Improve Controls

• Save & Load Patterns (support for common Life file formats)

• Create Patterns

• Optimize Code for Speed

• Larger Universe(?)

• Change Rules (already in code, but no menu for it...)

• Remove unneeded header files