Programming Cellular Automata - Life in 3d
This post covers the basics of cellular automata via Conway's game of life and a 3-dimensional derivative of it that I programmed. The images below are a couple frames extracted from that program. While at community college, I attended a night class in C-programming where I had the opportunity to develop Conway's game of life as a text program. It initiated a deep fascination for cellular automata and the idea that a computer could generate an entire world given a basic set of rules. Interestingly enough, Conway was not actually the founder of cellular automata. it was theorized 30 years earlier by John von Neumann & Stanislaw Ulam. von Neumann was interested in different methods of colonizing mars, and one of them involved self-replicating robots to setup living environments for humans. As a result of breaking that concept down to its foundations, Neumann was able to extract the theory of cellular automata. Conway popularized cellular automata with his game of life. He o...