Duel of Life: Two cellular automata compete against each other for survival!

Duel of Life

Duel of Life lets you define two life-like cellular automata that compete against each other in the struggle for survival. It is not a game, yet entertaining and fascinating to observe. Based on John Conway’s popular “Game of Life” principles, more than 260.000 different rulesets can be applied to both red and blue cells, many of them offering intriguing behaviour and visual appearance.

What is this all about?

If you are not familiar with cellular automata, here is a simple introduction:

Cellular automata are simulated on a 2-dimensional grid, where each cell can either be “on” or “off”, alive or dead. Each cell has eight adjacent neigbours around it. Rules define if a cell will be dead or alive in the next generation. For Conway’s “Life”, the following simple rules were chosen:

If a dead cell has 3 living neighbors (out of 8), it will become alive in the next generation.

If a living cell and has 2 or 3 living neighbors, it survives. Otherwise, it dies in the next generation.

This alone is enough to produce a very dynamic and suprising behaviour, similar to bacteria growth in a

petri dish filled with nutrient solution. Cellular automata are not constrained to these rules or neighbourships, there are a lot of variants with hexagonal or threedimensional grids, larger neighbourhoods or additional cell states. This app however focuses on the “life-like” automata, with 8 neighbouring cells.

How to use this?

Getting started is only a single click away. The “Start” button will launch the simulation. However, you can adjust a lot of options and parameters for the simulation, that are described hereafter. Here is a short description on how to use the app:

1. Go to Options and change performance, gameplay and visual settings to your liking.

2. Adjust the rules for both blue and red cells.

3. Start the simulation.

4. Pressing the menu button will open a set of tools, which are:

• Brush / Eraser • Blue / Red • Reset Time

• Play / Pause • Clear / Reset • Save single / multiple Images

5. You can paint new cells using your fingers. There is no goal, just play around and watch!

Feedback

Please leave feedback of any type! If you find any errors, please try to describe them and I will do my best to fix them.

Contact

I hope you enjoy this app! If you have any comments, requests or critique, feel free to send me a mail as I would love to hear from you.

Please have a look at my website:

http://www.cbuelter.de