Game of Life

• START --- start the game all over again
• PAUSE --- suspend the game for a close examination
• STEP --- run the game stepwise, can run from EDIT mode directly
• CONTINUE --- exit the step mode
• EDIT --- put the population pattern to your own favor, left button to add, middle to remove
• RESET --- reset the limit values
• LIMITS --- these are the critical values, see below for the detail

• The game itself

  I forgot who invented this game, actually maybe it is more correct to call it a simulation rather than a game. OK, the idea is this: suppose we are looking at a planet where lives a lot of creatures, who can each occupy a small space. The most important thing is that the life term of these creatures is solely decided by its neighbor population. A creature can either die because it is too "lonely" (catches some psycho-disease ?), or the outer world is so "crowed" that it cannot get enough living space anymore.

• The rules

  Now we know that the objective of the game is that given an initial state of all the creatures living condition, trying to develop the evolution history of the planet yourself. Obviously, the crucial thing is to decide the creterion of "loneliness" and "crowdness". These parameters should be adjustable for a real scientific simulation. However, we still give a popular definition as follows:
  less than 2 neighbors : lonely to die
  2 neighbors : survive
  3 neighbors : survive or a new creature is born
  more than 3 neighbors : crowd to die
  

• Examine the game

  At first glance, the survive creterion given above is of a kind of strict, only 2 out of 9 possible cases are favor to these creatures. You may wonder whether there will be any creature left after a long time of simulation. However, as you see our simulation for a while, you may be suprised at how strong the life of these creatures are. Starting at a really sparse distribution, these creatures tend to clone together and spawn forever.

• Examine the game again

  Here I give a planet size of 12x12, thus altogether there are 144 living areas creatures can grow, and 2 to the power of 144 different living patterns. I hope you can be convinced that after a certain peoriod, the life pattern of the planet can repeat, just like some thousands years before.

• My view

  This game is a very simple mathematical model reflecting the bio-society. It can be applied to the evolution history of many living creatures in a given region. I remember a similar model which was given by an economist in order to do research on some economic phenomina, and the model method helped him/her win the Nobel Prize!

• Other areas

  OK, how the heck is this related to the computer vision ? Well, the answer I can get so far is that it is a small extension of mathematical morphology. By applying the idea of mathematic morphology, we can do some unofficial stuff in computer vision, such as boolean smooth ... Oops, I have to take tomorrow's course to fill in this part!

Last modified: Sun Nov 17 13:23:26 1996