Hi everyone,

I'm aware that this has been attempted before but here's my take on implementing Conway's Game of Life using data structures. It's resizable and has outlets for values which I think are meaningful. The initial state is set by clicking some cells, and new cells can be added or removed at any time and will be included in the calculation for the next generation. It works with Pd 0.47.1 vanilla although it uses some abstractions from list-abs.

One hiccup with this implementation is that the bigger the gird the slower it is at updating the cells, so much so that for some big size/high speed combinations it's very sluggish indeed and borderline unusable, despite cpu levels being close to zero. I suspect this is due to the constant update of lots of scalars, but I have no experience with this.

UPDATE: the latest working patch v2.0 is a few posts down

A big thanks to @Jona who's helped me developing this, as well as everybody else who's given me advice on the topic. I've got to say that for a first project with data structures I definitely could've gone for something simpler, but I'm happy with the way it's turned out and I've learnt a lot.

@Hugo-Legrand Very nicely done, being able to add shapes with a click is much more useful than adding single or random cells.

with the sequencing in mind it could be nice if one can draw and save starting patterns that can have several shapes or/ and a certain number of the same shape (before starting the metro). it could be more "controllable" then. perhaps it could be also interesting to rotate a single shape in 90 degree steps or mirror them? or choose from common preset patterns like still life, oscillators or space ships? just some thoughts.
here are some spaceships:

You can save a whole drawing grid full of differents patterns.

I see. But you need to draw every single Pixel, for a small grid like that its totally fine but for a bigger grid it could be nice to draw shapes instead. Of course it depends on what you want to achieve.

Ok makes perfect sense. think it woudn't be too difficulte to add the possibility to click shapes on the drawing grid. I don't have the time right now. But it's doable.

I have to admit that I am short of time at the moment, too. I will think about it when I have more time again (and also check out and learn from your neural network patch).

life3.0 2.zip

Hello, @Jona, I think this update allows you to do what you wanted to do: once you've initalised the screen, you can stop the metro, and put as many shapes as you want before putting it back on. Also, you can select some shapes you load by using the keyboard (letters a,z,e,r) .
I'm also working on an additionnal output that would emit the state of the selected point of the screen. All of this is work in progress, no clean version.

@Hugo-Legrand thats very nice. it could be interesting to map sound and change the presets every xth iteration?

mmm. This is an interesting idea. I'm searing something.