Conway's Game of Life in HTML5 canvas
julianpulgarin.com
julianpulgarin.com
See the excellent http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/ for some ideas. That site also has its own RLE syntax for defining the patterns, so maybe you could crawl it and allow the user to use any of the 600-odd patterns they have on there.
That site brings back good memories from uni, I spent a long time converting iterations of GoL grids into MIDI notes and piping them to synths to make generative acid house.
This will probably require a rewrite of the current "nextGen()" algorithm, perhaps a quadtree implementation in Javascript or implementing some of the optimizations suggested in Chapters 17 and 18 of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programmer's Black Book.
By the way, you should post some of those MIDIs!
Because I had no desire to work out how to send clock data back from live into my hacked bit of ruby code, I simply sent MIDI clock signals from my code along with the note data. This meant that the iterations of the GoL were controlling the speed of live's sequencer.
As my code was very naive, it simply did its calculations, sent the notes and then did sleep(0.5) or something, then started the next iteration. This, along with ruby's garbage collection meant that the time taken for each iteration, and the delay between each MIDI clock signal, varied considerably.
All of this added up to a situation where the master clock in live was constantly wandering up and down by about 20bpm either way. Now remember I said that live was playing the drum tracks underneath? Live timestretches audio to the BPM of the master clock, so the whole track was constantly wavering in tempo. The whole thing sounded like an early 90s warehouse party aboard a pitching and rolling ship. Which is incidentally how I usually feel at warehouse parties.
At some point I plan to post the music with the code to my blog, along with all the other wacky shit I did at uni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life
Also see, "a Turing Machine implemented in Conway's Game of Life":
For example, the acorn pattern(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Game_of_life_acorn.svg) is a lot more impressive, because the gliders spawned travel across the screen and interact with the solid blocks. Empirically, it seems to make the pattern last a lot longer!
Very cool app though!
http://twoguysarguing.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/html-5-game-o...
http://benjaminplee.github.com/HTLM5-GoL/
I was planning on adding interactions like yours but never got around to it. Nice work!
The funniest thing about GOL is that the harder you try to make things live, quicker you kill it off. How can 4 simple rules develop such poignant insights?!
Also, as mentioned above about the MIDI I plan on making it into a step sequencer using the new js audio APIs but have not had a chance to do so yet.
The code is available on bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/gkatsev/gameoflife.js
http://michaelglass.github.com/conway-dark-roast/
and here's my coworkers much more fleshed out version:
why? nice excuse to learn canvas, coffeescript, tdd in javascript. certainly can do it with divs (in fact mpg did it that way first).
When we developed swarmation.com we started with canvas and later switched to plain divs. Not only did we manage to throw out most of the code in the switch, things also ran much more smoothly and worked in IE as well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cool new tech, and canvas definitely has its uses. But we should be helping people recognize when plain HTML or SVG are more appropriate, rather than being buzzword-driven.