![]() ![]() ![]() Some of these results look strangely human-created even, like these pixel art ghosts from earlier in the very same pattern progression:Ī symmetrical starting pattern will always result in symmetrical results as you’d expect, but the true chaos begins when you go asymmetrical. Most of these didn’t produce very interesting results, but a few turned out some beautiful patterns like the one above, just the 59th round (iteration? I want to use that word but I don’t know if it’s correct here) out from a pretty simple cross-shaped starting pattern. Today, there’s a far easier and better way to play Conway’s Game of Life than running LifeGenesis on a virtual machine: you can instead visit this site and run patterns on an effectively infinite grid, meaning you can get far more interesting and complex results than you would otherwise on that restricted game board.Īgain, I went straight for the symmetrical patterns, trying out various starting positions. This board is meant to be used in matches against other human opponents I guess, even if there is a difficulty option featured (though the computer opponent still seems to be absent, so I have no idea what you’d do with this game’s difficulty setting.) There’s a lot more you can do with the Game of Life, but LifeGenesis, as interesting as it must have been to people who knew about this in the early 90s, is unfortunately restricted with a finite game board. Take a row of 10 live cells, which you might not expect anything interesting from: you’ll end up with a changing pattern going through several cycles that repeat infinitely: While some of these patterns die out or freeze in place after several rounds, others have surprising properties. Throwing down random clumps of blocks like I did the first time I played LifeGenesis can be pretty amusing for a few minutes, but the most interesting patterns to me are the symmetrical kind, easily produced by a symmetrical starting pattern of live cells. ![]() Since the game continues tracking these changes from step to step, you’ll end up with a morphing pattern that might either die out completely, get frozen in a certain position, or bloom out into a progressively larger pattern. The gist is that on a potentially infinite grid, you can place “live” cells as you would pieces on a board, and their status changes based on their position and their neighbors. I’d explain the rules, but better to let the man himself do that: computer like most of the other such games in these packs, but that doesn’t change the fact that I just didn’t get what was going on and didn’t read the game’s documentation, which actually explains what it is: a very limited Windows-based version of Conway’s Game of Life, a sort of program (or cellular automaton as he called it) created by mathematician John Conway in 1970. Granted, it was represented as a two-player game that I thought would be set up as player vs. When I played LifeGenesis, I didn’t really understand what I was looking at and assumed it was a broken two-player Go or Reversi spinoff of some kind. ![]()
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