Cogoli

This is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life, and modifications. You can run the standard game, but the rules, the display the backend store and even the initialisation routines can be swapped out by using alternative callback modules.

Cogoli is in fact a wrapper for the Erlang app cgolam.

Running the standard game

Start a standard game like this:

iex(1)> Cogoli.start(
    width: 40,
    height: 40
)
{:ok, #PID<0.83.0>}

A coloured variation

This looks like different species competing and interbreeding, but the rules are the same as the standard game, so they are cooperative really.

Cogoli.start(
    title: "Coloured Conway's Game of Life",
    interval: 50,
    rules: [cgolam_rules_coloured: []],
    field: [cgolam_field_ets: []],
    width: 150,
    height: 150,
    display: [cgolam_display_wx: [sqsize: 5]],
    init: [cgolam_rules_coloured: [default: [cluster_size: 150]]]
)

Multiple species

To see an attempt at a true multi species varient, try this one:

Cogoli.start(
    title: "Coloured Conway's Game of Life",
    interval: 50,
    rules: [cgolam_rules_species3: [colmatch_algorithm: :common_duo]],
    field: [cgolam_field_ets: []],
    width: 150,
    height: 150,
    display: [cgolam_display_wx: [sqsize: 5]],
    init: [cgolam_rules_species3: [default: [
        cluster_size: 300,
        cluster_density: 100,
        clusters: 3
    ]]],
)

A bit like CGoL generally, it's not so much a life simulation as a curious demonstration of emergent behaviour, it's difficult to say if this exhibits any real competition, but there are elements of that inherent to this cgolam_rules_species3 algorithm certainly.

A single colour will perform entirely according the the CGoL rules but when multiple colours colide, like the coloured version above the results can be a colour combination... but the difference here is that the colours are actually entirely independent from each other and a colour merge only occurs when there is competition for a common cell (i.e. in a given game cycle two different colours both want to occupy the same cell), where as two colours can in fact operate along side one another without having any affect on each other at all IF they never compete...

What constitutes the same colour is a tricky thing, if an exact match is required then the chances of a new colour establishing are small so some tolerance tends to result in more interesting simulations.

For a non tolerant version of the above try changing :common_duo to :intolerant_duo.

In many ways the simple coloured version looks more interesting, though I think the 'species' versions are intellectually more so.

For more information about the game specification properties; how else the rules, field, init modules can be configured, please see cgolam.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding :cogoli to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:cogoli, "~> 1.0.1"},
  ]
end

Licensing

Copyright 2018 Michael Wright mjw@methodanalysis.com

'cgolam' is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license.