[PD] The Game of Life

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Fri Dec 3 15:19:25 CET 2010


On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Andrew Faraday wrote:

> * Does anyone know if it's been done in puredata before? Can I get hold of it?

I made gridflow/examples/game_of_life.pd in 2001 (well, actually ported to 
Pd in 2002-2003, but it was precisely the same code).

Since then, I improved it somewhat, and it became this crazy thing that 
computes three wraparound 640x480 boards at a time at 60 fps on my old 
Pentium-M. That's 55 million computed cells per second.

You can easily readapt it to a single board at whatever resolution you 
want, and display it the way you want (convert to pix, pdp, lists, etc).

> * Is it well documented enough?

What do you need to be documented about it ?

> * Does it work on different operating systems (was made on ubuntu 
> (netbook remix) so some of it may not transfer)?

Has been seen working on many Linuxes, OSX, Windows. (though conversion 
from grid to gem still doesn't work on Windows : you have to convert to 
list first instead)

> * How might you improve on this?

No idea, I put all the tricks I could to make this version fast, without 
writing any dedicated C++ code.

> I may, in the longer run, be planning to use this for a generative music 
> patch. Don't know if that means anything to you.

How will you turn a [time,rows,columns] animation into a [time,frequency] 
series of spectra, or a [time] signal ?

What I write within [] are dimensions of the data. A game of life 
animation has at least 3 dimensions (though in my patch I use 4 
dimensions, but that's not relevant).

  _______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC


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