Game of Life

A rather complex story that involves few tools.

It started with a podcast episode, coupled with few p5js bits, packed in a gem-based Jekyll theme. Finally, it’s spiced up with the Game of Life, a mathematical example illustrating how a few simple rules… complicate life.

I don't expect to find inspiration. It just sort of comes.
Sometimes you step on a bug and you get inspired.

— Iris Apfel

One of the podcasts I enjoyed listening to was Changelog’s Request For Commits. The particular episode which inspired me, is about design and designing the p5js culture.

p5js

p5js is JavaScript library created by Lauren McCarthy and developed by the community collaborators.

p5.js is a community interested in
exploring the creation of art and design with technology.

We like these hashtags:
#noCodeSnobs (because we value community over efficiency),
#newKidLove (because we all started somewhere),
#unassumeCore (because we don't assume knowledge),
and #BlackLivesMatter (because of course).

So, I skimmed through the p5js docs - and it felt so great 👏! On top of that - being able to create an interactive page in just a few minutes - made my day. All in all - everything just clicked! Tnx to this library, I was able to clearly imagine the GoL’s patterns and quickly brought the game to life.

If you are reading the web version of this post and you haven’t already started the Game, feel free to press key e from the comfort of your keyboard. In all other cases, please click here and continue from the previous sentence 😻.

Theme features

Since p5js relies on events and callback functions, you can easily add a functionality to your page. This made breaking the rule of Game quite a plasant exprience. Now, everyone can interact with an ongoing game with few vim-inspired commands:

• press e to start and/or restart the Game
• if your eyes are a bit tired and you’d prefer to quietly read a page you can
  • type q to remove cells from the screen
  • type p to pause the Game (use s to resume the Game)
• type i to start the Insert Mode where you can create new cells
  • with a click of a mouse new cells will be randomily created around
  • if you are feeling happy, drag mouse to create some more
• press ESC to — escape the Insert Mode
• use j and k to control the speed
• to change the cells’ color press any additional key

Jekyll

At this point, I wanted to pack it in a Ruby gem and decided to create a Jekyll theme. Coming all the way back from 2008, Jekyll is static site generator written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, Github’s cofounder.

So, if you are reading this on my blog - it’s a Jekyll generated one :) All articles are written in plain Markdown and template processing is handled by Liquid, a templating language created by Shopify. This makes writing HTML much easier 😌.

Packing Jekyll theme in a Ruby gem

This step was easy as well. Basically, by following these steps I:

• created a RubyGems account
• made sure that bundler and jekyll are in place

gem install bundler
gem install jekyll

• created a gem

jekyll new-theme jekyll-theme-name
gem build jekyll-theme-name.gemspec

• and published it

Voila! Its code is available here. So after all it’s I-listened-to-a-podcast-and-this-is-what-happened-to-me kind of a post.

Game of life

The universe of the game is fairly simple. The two-dimensional grid contaise cells that are either alive or dead. Based on its eight neighbours, games decides if a particular cell will be alive in the next generation. This happens according to the following rules:

• Loneliness: any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies
• Overpopulation: a live cell with more than three live neighbours dies
• Stasis: a live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation
• Reproduction: a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours will come to life.

This might seem like a boring game at first, but it is not easy to predict whether the game will end or go on infinitely :) Also, there are many different bautiful patterns which might pop up. These are classified according to their behavior - like spaceships. The most recently descovered spaceship is Sir Robin. Its name is a reference to Monty Python’s “Brave Sir Robin”, who bravely runs away as fast as possible.

Some ideas

As the time allows, I’d like to make the creation of some famous cellular automatons way easier. (And to periodically update this story :)