Ken Rawlings

Since becoming interested in Artificial Life & computer based simulation several months ago I’ve spent a great deal of time researching Artificial Life & simulation, and a great deal of time programming. But I realized recently that most of that programming has been building foundations to do work with, but very little coding on the actual topic that got me started! So yesterday I put together a simple implementation of Conway’s Game of Life . If you’ve never played around with the Game of Life, I highly recommend giving it a try. My implementation (along with full OCaml source) can be downloaded here. There’s an included binary for Windows, but it should be compilable on any system that OCaml/LablGL works on.

I had a lot of fun programming my Life implementation and it’s neat to see the complex patterns that can be generated from such simple rules. The pattern that’s loaded up when the program runs is one that I found while playing around that surprised me just how interesting the result was (the pattern is just 8 cells in a jagged line, but runs for many generations).

For a much more feature rich version of Life (for Windows) check out Life32. It’s an impressive piece of work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 at 3:21 pm and is filed under alife, ocaml, programming, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.