Life on the Edge / Edges of Chaos /Inukchuk

The following applet - still under development but usable - implements an automaton, possibly new, similar in spirit to Conway's "Life". It is played on the edges of the grid, not the cells; and the birth and survival rules are both simply "2". That is, an edge - whether currently occupied or not - with exactly two occupied neighbours in generation N will be occupied in generation N+1, otherwise not.


To use this applet, you currently need a fairly high-resolution monitor, as it's 800x900 pixels. (I hope to come up with a rescalable version, or at least a small one, soon) Click on edges of the light gray grid to turn them on or off, then on the "Run1", "Run10", or "Run100" buttons at the bottom of the applet to run 1, 10 or 100 generations. You can keep evolving your pattern as long as you like, but will need to restart the applet to draw a new one.

Known bugs:

  1. The original intent was for the "Run10" and "Run100" buttons to show all generations, not just the last one. They don't, because the mouse click handler doesn't know how to take turns so repaint() never gets a chance. This too will be fixed in my Copious Free Time. However, I must say that the "time travel" aspect is useful if I want to revisit Generation 735 - which in this game is not impossible. I will probably give the options of "Run100" and "Jump100" rather than removing the fast forward.
  2. No save, no open. That is an applet thing and may stay.
  3. No resize (there is now an adjustable zoom level but the window size is fixed.) If you have a low-res monitor you may find this annoying. The short-term patch may be a smaller version on its own page.