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Elena del Rivero, Domestic Landscapes, 2019 [Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Guadalajara, and Ciudad de México]

In the civilizations I have created plazas are planned to intertwine with parks. Pavement paths radiate from the centers of cities transitioning to beaches, woods and fields of grass. Along the way are indications of how each interrelates to the other. So stones embedded in the roadways become indistinguishable from the pebbles strewn upon the sands. It is only at instances fleeting like deja vu that the individual might realize they are in one place distinct from the other.

velvetblackpixel

f l o w t h r o u g h

neilmakesgames

So what did your implementation end up looking like? Did it have a 2D table for rules, or..?

Yeah, at this point it’s identical to what Loren described here on twitter.

This is in javascript because I wanted to test some es6 features I haven’t used before.

A rule is a 2d array containing values of 0, 1, 2, or 3:

Here’s the JS that applies the rule to each cell:

Every step, for each cell, we loop through the neighboring cells in its Moore Neighborhood (the 8 cells around it, not counting itself).

We count the number of neighbors that have 1s and 2s.

We use the 1s value to pick a row in the rule array, and the 2s value to pick an element from that array. (That values is stored as ‘outcome.’)

The outcome of 3 is “stay the same,” so we just return the cell’s same value.

Otherwise, we return whatever value was in the rule table at rule[ones][twos].

For the non-programmers reading this, just read it as “each cell gets a new value determined by counting how many of each type of neighbor it has.”

Future areas for expansion I might tackle: random chance in rules, randomly setting a few cells to random values each step, adding history as a rule input, adding more possible states (represented by a larger color palette), having cells’ colors determined by combinations of their neighbors colors.

Thanks for the question :)