By mrtnj
Conway’s Game of life is probably the most famous cellular automaton, consisting of a grid of cells developing according simple rules. Today, we’re going to add mutation and selection to the game, and see let patterns evolve.
The fate of a cell depends on the number cells that live in the of neighbouring positions. A cell with fewer than two neighbours die from starvation. A cell with more than three neighbours die from overpopulation. If a position is empty and has three neighbours, it will be filled by a cell. These rules lead to some interesting patterns, such as still lives that never change, oscillators that alternate between states, patterns that eventually die out but take long time to do so, patterns that keep generating new cells, and so forth.
When I played with the Game of life when I was a child, I liked one pattern called ”virus”, that looked a bit like this. On its own, a grid of four-by-four blocks is a still life, but add one cell (the virus), and the whole pattern breaks. This is a version on a 30 x 30 cell board. It unfolds rather slowly, but in the end, a glider collides with a block, and you are left with some oscillators.
There are probably other interesting ways that evolution could be added to the game of life. We will take a hierarchical approach where the game is taken to describe development, and the unit of selection is the pattern. Each generation, we will create a variable population of patterns, allow them to develop and pick the fittest. So, here the term ”development” refers to what happens to a pattern when applying the rules of life, and the term ”evolution” refers to how …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com