The author has a YouTube channel and speaks at length about cellular automata and other artificial intelligence. It's a good time! (https://www.youtube.com/@EmergentGarden)
Neat. I thought it was a peculiar visualization of Conway's Life at first, but it's got a more complex set of rules. The presentation and controls are pretty good. I'd like to be able to see which organism type is which, and especially be able to zoom in on any new ones.
It's been running for me for a few minutes at top speed and it hasn't gone over 8 celled organisms, but it had an explosion at some point where it went from just a few species to over 200. I wonder if the algorithm could be memoized like in hashlife.
This one seems quite a bit more sophisticated but the dynamics are very similar.
If you ever get the chance I recommend writing your own life simulator program, it’s great fun! It also demonstrates how easy it is to produce complex behavior from relatively simple instructions
You don’t really need an engine. You just need the right data structure to represent a cell and simple methods.
What you may be asking about is visualization. In this case, just use simple drawning functions in a graphics library that will draw a pixel to a screen canvas at the cells coordinates. Update on each tick.
I agree Golly is the best for specifically cellular automata, but I came across this program called Visions of Chaos and I was shocked to see it essentially supports any and all types of simulation/generative/procedural/AI solvers and renderers OOTB (it downloads them as needed the first time you use each one) and it seems to have new updates almost every time I open the software.
Seriously amazing for not only fun but easy access to preconfigured solvers if you want to quickly test out ideas, plus it’s packed with presets too. I’ve racked up many hours using it since finding out about it a few months ago, highly recommend.
