Comment by JoeDaDude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeDaDude | Hacker News Reader

A silly question and a PSA:

1. There was a two-player game called The Immigration Game [1] using GoL rules. Has anyone actually played this? Even better, has anyone developed an AI to play it? Is there really much of a game there?

2. The PSA: The Immigration Game was described in Lifeline, a 1970's era (typewritten!) newsletter about GoL. I managed to obtain a set of them. I've been planning to scan them and make them available online. I don't think there is any ground breaking info in them, after all, folk were programming on mainframes (surreptitiously).

[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129088/the-immigration-g...

My sense is that people don't usually play the Immigration Game for very long -- it just doesn't seem all that interesting to most folks ... and so there hasn't been much interest in developing a computer opponent for the game.

It seems to be rather difficult to convert cellular automata into any kind of playable game. If it's an arcade game then it's usually too arbitrary, and if it's a puzzle game then it's usually way too easy or way too difficult. There have been some good efforts, but they're mostly only playable by dedicated Lifenthusiasts, and that's ... well... not a very large market!

Re: the LIFELINE public service announcement -- no need to do the scanning and online-ing. That's been done already, though there's still some review and typing-up work left for someone to do:

  https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Lifeline_issues

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