A competitive multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life | Hacker News Reader

A competitive multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life

lifecompetes.com

143 pointsUse35 comments

When the Microsoft Store first came out, I remember they went around college campuses offering $100 per each app submitted to the store. This multiplayer version of Conway's game of life is one of the first apps I implemented and cashed in. I had previously participated in a hackathon that had us implement this version of Game of Life, and I thought it'd make a good app. Sadly, it looks like it's been removed from the store by now.

P.S. The Microsoft representative didn't seem to have much confidence in the quality of apps submitted. He sold it to us by saying that it was just for growth and that they were trying to catch up to the Apple store, which had already had its period of growth with "useless Fart apps". He even offered a "whack-a-mole" style template game that you could re-theme with different images and submit for $100.

Microsoft has a history of being laser focused on petty things like number of apps or how naming it the Xbox 2 would make it inferior to the PlayStation 3. If they had instead focused that energy towards quality, who knows what might happen.

As a consumer (SO’s perspective) even as a PS-biased player, she feels as if the Xbox 360’s naming was enough to potentially sway her.

Maybe there’s a reason, even if we’re not fans.

Did she think she missed out on Xboxes 3 through 359, so the 360th one must've been good?

I don’t know if this is true, but the xbox naming definitely never made sense to me.

Nintendo tried that with the wii U and look at how successful it was.

Of course, the Wii U was released well after the Xbox 2 (360) and about a year before the Xbox One.

I worked on a business that lived of selling Microsoft licenses like Office and the Windows Server version. They also came with this idea of creating apps but for Windows Phone. There was some people uploading more than 100 apps to the store with things like recipes, free books, mini games, etc. They distributed a few Windows Phones as prizes. It was very weird and I don't know who came up with the idea.

Hi! this is an old player from lifecompetes. I think this just nearly killed the site. Anyways, you can place some patterns from https://conwaylife.com/wiki/, and placing patterns from https://conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_long-lived_methuselahs will not work well because the site is bounded in an 50x100 grid, where they do not get to live that long. I would suggest you to check out https://conwaylife.com/wiki/ or https://catagolue.hatsya.com/census/b3s23/C1 to learn more about conway's game of life.

It would be interesting to create this on a larger grid, I wonder what the technical limitations for this are.

Which brings the question: where could be the sweet spot regarding the grid size, ie best bang for buck when there is a set per-cell price, or some other soft size limit?

On a vaguely related note, I created a video game that is essentially a shoot-em-up version of Conway's Game Of Life: https://xtaloid.itch.io/xtaloid

Awesome. Some cube going through a Conway universe shooting up Blocks and Blinkers is the hero we need.

Love the sounds. Very reminiscent of Defender

Check out https://github.com/rickhull/conway_deathmatch for a simple ruby implementation. Also there is an elixir branch...

An alternate name is “Conway’s Game of Death”

I discovered Life because of a novel written about a competitive version - The Gameplayers of Zan by M.A. Foster.

It's very 70s, so it's a little ponderous and top heavy, more than a little hippyish, but with a distinctive vibe - a bit of Dune with overtones of Blade Runner set in a partial utopia of sorts. And some unexpected implications for cellular automata.

I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read something unusual. It made a real impression on me at the time.

Note: DO NOT READ THE REVIEWS on Amazon or Goodreads.

There's an incredible plot twist at the heart of the book, and some of the reviews give it away.

cool. i just found this neato so sharing.

this pattern is stable

0 X 0

X 0 X

0 X 0

let's get quickly to get 30 to if you can stay isolated and build up blocks, and it only uses 6 initial.

apparently this is pretty common! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59573414/how-to-escape-s...

Nice project! My friend and I have been working on a very different take on multiplayer CGOL. The multiplayer part is in progress still, but you can see what we have here:

https://github.com/conwayste/conwayste

There was a game-of-life board game created way back when, The Immigration Game, which has since been implemented in Golly.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129088/immigration-game

Awesome. Is there a collection of GoL implementations? It would be impossible to be exhaustive, but I've been collecting them and I'd love a resource that makes an attempt to document as many as possible.

Yes. I suggest you to download golly, using this link: http://golly.sourceforge.net/ It contains a vast set of rules and patterns.

I don't know about an existing list but I created a unique implementation a while ago that I'd like you to add to your list. It's available at https://congol.net and the source is at https://github.com/lukew3/congol. Pretty similar to lifecompetes in that it's a multiplayer game of life, but is designed specifically for two duelling players.

This isn’t quite what you’re looking for but I have a GitHub project to create various implementations, including for ethereum! https://github.com/conwaysgame

EDIT: perhaps the GitHub’s main README could include links to various implementations too!

That's just a competition of shapes driven by the same rule, which doesnt even conserve the energy. I'd go one level deeper and make it a competition of rules.

ooh, that's fun! though it'd be more fun to know the rules, esp about when users cells collide

There is a rules tab!

And the code looks to be here: https://github.com/drewblaisdell/conway/blob/master/core/gri...

It's 8 years old!

It seems the rules and getDominantNeighbor assume it’s a two player game. With more than two players, all 3 ‘parents’ of a to-be-born cell may be from different teams.

Stuck at connecting forever.

Can someone who could get it to work give a cue about what's going on?

It's probably overloaded. Maybe anyone who's in can count how many people are playing?

Really fun, but laggy and eventually it failed to place blocks.

That's neat. But don't read the chatbox.

yeah, chatbox is shitshow. Truly a wild west there.

Can someone put this on a blockchain and attach price/revenue to owning blocks?

Fun!

My name keeps changing though.

excellent! You crashed the server.

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