Synapse Drip · generative art
Game of Life
Cellular automata: This is the Game of Life, invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970: a grid of cells, each alive or dead, that all change at once by two rules. A live cell with two or three live neighbours (of the eight around it) stays alive, with fewer it dies of loneliness and with more of crowding; a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes alive. Nobody plays: from the starting scatter, the rules alone make still shapes, blinkers and gliders that crawl across the grid. Cells that have just died leave a fading ghost, and a trickle of sparks keeps new life arriving.
Hearted by 1 person in the Gallery.
The mathematics
- Each cell has eight neighbours, so there are 512 possible local situations (its own state and the eight around it), and the rule gives a fixed answer to each; everything seen here follows from that table.
In art
- Spiral waves like these have been photographed in chemical dishes, in slime mould colonies and in heart tissue, and the pictures all look like each other, which is why the simple model is so convincing.
Made with Cellular automata.
Piece c8b7c6d8439f8350