All of the examples that I tried reached steady state extremely quickly. 2D game of life can often go for quite a while before reaching steady state.
I do not know if this is because the rule used for 3D isn't very good, or if this is a problem with all rules for 3D games like this. It is actually very hard to find good rules that don't just explode or die off or reach steady state quickly.
Searching for "better rules of life" was a project of mine a while back, and I looked at all possible rules for 2D that are of the same format as the standard except using 5x5, and although I did find some that had better stats for not reaching steady state/exploding/etc, none had that "character" of conway's game of life of unpredictability, it really is a remarkable game.
Yeah, the rules don't scale as well as I would have liked. I started with scaled rules based on the original rules:
Loneliness: sqrt(1)^3 = 1
Breed: sqrt(3)^3 = 5.196152423 = 5
Overcrowd: sqrt(4)^3 = 8
That didn't work out so well, so with a little trial and error, I came to the final:
Loneliness: 2 (having 1 caused checkerboard walls everywhere)
Breed: 3-5
Overcrowd: 8
In due course, I plan to build in some form of "editor" because currently it just randomly places squares. I think that if you can specifically place some squares, it might produce some more interesting patterns.
Strange coincidence, but I was playing with the idea of a 3D game of life a few weeks ago and put the quick-and-dirty project up on GitHub. https://github.com/jl2/LifeAutomata
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadI do not know if this is because the rule used for 3D isn't very good, or if this is a problem with all rules for 3D games like this. It is actually very hard to find good rules that don't just explode or die off or reach steady state quickly.
Searching for "better rules of life" was a project of mine a while back, and I looked at all possible rules for 2D that are of the same format as the standard except using 5x5, and although I did find some that had better stats for not reaching steady state/exploding/etc, none had that "character" of conway's game of life of unpredictability, it really is a remarkable game.
That didn't work out so well, so with a little trial and error, I came to the final: Loneliness: 2 (having 1 caused checkerboard walls everywhere) Breed: 3-5 Overcrowd: 8
In due course, I plan to build in some form of "editor" because currently it just randomly places squares. I think that if you can specifically place some squares, it might produce some more interesting patterns.
It tends to either die out quickly, or bloom and take up most of the grid.
It also runs a lot slower now.
It may happen. It'll probably be behind a level/position editor, though.
One interesting version I came up with was to have the 2D version "grow" upwards: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6461000807_8c06428bb1_b.j...
I remember having similar scaling problems with the "real" 3D version, but don't remember off hand if I came up with a solution.
I have, in my head, some interesting shapes that I think might react well given the rules I have. I might put a few of them in and see how they go.