Conway's Life, which extra features would be nice?

Projects General Guidance
21

One way to detect stagnation is set two copies running in lockstep. One does 2 generations
while the other does one. You compare the grids after each such cycle, if they are
identical you have detected a cycle.

The downside is it gets slower and slower at detecting cycles as time goes on, but you can
always reset the slower copy to the faster one every N goes if you are only interested
in cycles of length N or less.

It actually probably easiest to just look for cycles in the count of live cells (this works nicely
for traffic lights and gliders).

22

I did one on Flash and Processing. It's fun stuff.
If you can draw with your fingers and set in motion with a tap, that would be more interactive and awesome.

As for stagnation, easiest to count how many active pixels.

23

Here's another method to detect stagnation:

  1. Take a snapshot of the current field (ie, copy the current field to a snapshot field).
  2. Display the current field.
  3. Update the current field to the next generation.
  4. If the current field is the same as the snapshot field, the game is stagnant; randomize the field and go to 1.
  5. If N generations have passed since a snapshot was taken, go to 1.
  6. Go to 2.

Upsides: you don't need a perfect hash function. For N=10 generations, it takes less space than storing 10 32-bit hash values.

Downside: it can take up to N generations to detect a stagnant game (but it should detect a stagnant game after N/2 generations on average).

24

mistergreen:
If you can draw with your fingers and set in motion with a tap, that would be more interactive and awesome.

That is an awesome feature, but unfortunately pretty hard to implement with my setup. I do not have touch sensitive LED matrices :smiley:

I appreciate your help on the stagnation problem but AGAIN, please keep the thread on topic. This is about suggesting functionality for the system NOT about the stagnation problem. For that go here: stagnation problem.

Thanks.