Conway's "Game of Life", in 3D

This year is the 40th anniversary of John Conway's zero-player game "Life". As a small tribute, I wrote a hasty 3D version of the game. It's written in C, and uses OpenGL to render the cube of cells. The cube contains 45 * 45 * 45 cells, and it plays by the standard "34/2" rules, which judging from the chaos that quickly ensues in the cube isn't optimal for a 3D version of Life.

You can read more about Conway's Game of Life on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• conway
• game
• of
• life
• cellular
• automaton
• 3d
• opengl

[ElanIbghy]

Hi, Ive been looking everywhere and trying hard to create exactly what youve done with the game of life in 3d. Im an architecture student at mcgill university and id really appreciate if you can help me out?

Thanks,

Elan

[stolendata]

@ElanIbghy Just like how I in a 2D version of Life count the number of living cells in the 8 surrounding slots around the cell I'm evaluating, I here in this 3D version also count the number of living cells in the 9 adjacent slots above and under each cell. Consider each cell as being the center of a 3 * 3 * 3 cube.

[sep332]

Very cool! Do the edges wrap around?

Have you tried experimenting with different rulesets? What about running 2D life, but showing the different generations on different planes? I think that might look cool too.

[stolendata]

@sep332 No, the edges are all "dead" cells in this version. I've played around with all various rulesets and in this square 3D version, and nothing comes close to the 2D version's scenery - it either dies fast, or it grows out of proportion, like in my video. It simply seems to work best with a low number of possible neighbour cells. I have a hexagonal 2D version I made some years ago that is pretty cool, and I'll expand it to 3D some day, which should work better than this square 3D version.

[odd357]

disco disco party party

[lalamonkeydude]

@stolendata

>Implying 3d hexagons

[YorkLumsey]

@turoniable - Yes. Globally, we are also headed for a massive "reset", since you cannot harbour an infinitely huge population on a fixed-area planet.

You can only put so many people in a canoe before it turns over. Only so many people even in the largest ocean liner... 3,000 is acceptable; 80,000 will be crushingly overcrowding & top-heavy.

The Earth is a "ship" in space with only so much surface area. Do we have to reach "crushing overload" before realizing the damage we are doing?

[16fcali]

@YorkLumsey Perhaps you mean amazing like ANY replicating process.

[turoniable]

@YorkLumsey I think it is reduced because it is being reset

[YorkLumsey]

How amazingly like Man's own pattern of expansion.... grow like cancer on overdrive, to fill every possible niche, until choking on your own waste, and then die off in massive numbers.

The entire concept, reduced to minutes instead of eons.

[GordonCSA]

@benfarahmand That does sound rather interesting.

[SMWssaamm]

I'm fairly certain the life standard in larger neighborhoods is grow (the absolute largest number that allows bounding box escape), survive (the grow through 2/3-3/4 of the grow)