Conway's Game of Life on .NET 3.0

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: garkon
Do people sit and watch this program, and "discover" things. Do they just call something whatever they want, i'm confused, someone explain to me how retarded i am.

Damn, how long have we got?

 

[garkon]

Dosent make any sense to me, it just seems like randomness of little shapes. Do you "play" it, or watch it? Then if it looks like it could be a spaceship\glider\computer????, someone names it, and viola, discovery. Seems like everybody would eventualy see the same thing. Interesting though, makes me wanna find something, but i doubt i ever would.

edit: oh ya, F mmmSyscraper.

 

[Markbnj]

seems like everybody would eventually see the same thing

Well, on a 50 x 50 grid of 2-state cells there are 2^2500 possible states for the grid... so it might take awhile before everybody sees the same thing.

Seriously, the fascination, for those who are fascinated, comes from the fact that the very simple rules about which cells turn on and which turn off leads to such complex patterns of activity. Everything from oscillating patterns to complex "puffers" that traverse the grid endlessly leaving a wake of disintegrating patterns behind. It's pretty neat, but probably only interesting to a fairly narrow set of people.

 

[garkon]

I see, it's just the fact that it could just move a line across the screen, but randomly creates images that seem to have some coherency, and actually look like something. Makes me wanna look at it to see if i see an alien life form.