I got bored, so here's a picture of my third year university project.

Link

It's basically a framework for development of cellular AI agents. Once it's complete it should be able to do things like model the behaviour of Ant colonies, i'll probably try and copy that Zombie simulator I saw a while back too.

It's currently got a few models working, Conway's Game of Life and the Greenberg-Hastings excitable-state automata. There's also a few fun ones that I made for the sake of it.

I'll probably make it available for download at some point so people can play around with it.

Neat. So it models that game of life, eh? That was always fun. Wasted so many hours of my childhood on that. Looks very nice. Nice GUI, etc.

Neato.
I think I even understand what it is. :p

Not the board game you dolt!

Definitly don't understand this whatsoever.

Wow...very nice. The more I see of what (i assume computer science or a related field) majors are doing, the more I'm sure it's what I want to do. This is exactly the kind of project I would undertake. I'd love to see it in action.

Just to shatter everybody's dreams, it's written in Java.

A few screen captures.

THAT is Life, Freelancer.

CAs are cool. I like that you included a bunch of different ones (the lovely GUI is a nice touch too; and the zoom is definitely a good idea). So when it's complete, will you actually be able to go in and change the rules for the individual cells manually?

My dreams are shattered.

Looks cool though. Makes my Scrabble AI look cheesy (and I'll never write another Java program after that one). Shame I like Operating Systems and Algorithms better than this, because this is pretty spiffy stuff.

I just wrote this one quickly, it's kinda cool though. Each cell chooses a random neighbouring cell to steal the colour of. The colours all start off completely random and then clusters start to form.



At the moment you won't be able to change the rules of individual cells, any changes will be applied to all copies of that agent globally (it's far more practical for me). Each agent type is actually a java class that implements an agent interface. so basically they're free to do whatever they want within the limits of the environment. I'm working on properly implementing pheromones (the 1st, 5th and 6th screenshots are actually pheremone views), once this is done i'll be able to do the Ant and Zombie simulators (the Zombies will be able to sniff out people even if they can't see them).

Yeah, I know. And that was what I was talking about when I said "The Game of Life". That's what it's called.

I spent 5 minutes trying to fiddle with the buttons on that first link until I realized it was a .PNG. O.o

Silly Zell.

I just wrote a new simulation, this one makes spiral-like shapes.

I am not sure what so ever what the hell this is

A fun thing to do with the Game of Life is to set up logic gate structures. Then you can build up mini computers. I forget exactly how you set them up, but you should be able to google it.

[Edit: ah yes, the key is to set up "gliders", there's a bit of info on these pages:
http://www.reed.edu/alife/classes/models/life/
]

I don't get the joke about java, but the program looks really interesting. Wrote a simple port of conway's game of life myself, back in time. I think it was my first VB "code".

detty, Lsd is baaad, m'kay

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

What's worse is setting that last picture as your wallpaper.

same.

anyone care to emphasize what psychadellic images have to do with programming languages?

What's happening is you've got a grid of agents [read: pixels]. Each 'round' of the simulation, each agent changes state [read: colour] (or not) based on what the neighbouring agents' states are.

The simulation will start off with each agent being in a random state, and will look like static on your TV (if you had just black and white states - imagine that with many colours). Then depending on what rules the agents follow, after a while you start getting patterns in the output. That's what Det is posting pictures of - the result of the self-organisation of the system.

The programming aspect of it is that Det had to code the framework that the simulation is running in. It's a great little system to code. I remember having to code a very limited Game Of Life as part of my Java course. It being a one week software exercise it was much less refined than Det's system sounds to be and much less flexible (i.e. ONLY did GoL, couldn't change the behaviour of agents etc).

STOP CRUSHING MY DREAMS YOU...DREAM CRUSHER!

http://etc.dettylog.co.uk/emergy/

download emergy.jar and Agents.zip

extract Agents.zip to a folder somewhere

run with:

java -jar emergy.zip [path to where you extracted the agents]

There are a few bugs and typos i've since fixed.

The easiest ones to setup are (just select from the list and fill all):

GreenbergHastings
Voter
Cyclic