Conway's Game of Life is my goto "learn a new language" project. It covers most of a languages surface. data structures, conditionals, loops, stdlib. And the rules are <i>just</i> complex enough to get a sense of how the language works.
Really cool. Spent ages building a glider gun and then pointed it in the wrong direction...<p>I think there are probably a few too many civilians in there as well, messed up any cool formations I had far too early for them to be effective.
I had a lot of fun with this, until now:<p>My challenge has been accepted, but my challenger will not place his armies, and so I'm effectively unable to play.<p>Perhaps he's placing a really, really elaborate pattern.<p>Edit: He placed about 30 minutes after accepting. I could still see this being a problem, and so this is a type of bug report.
Not meant as a criticism, but a thought: It's a bit ironic that for a thing meant to demonstrate the concept of emergence, players are designing states rather than rules conducive to emergence.<p>For example, imagine a game where flocks of boids[1] did battle, but instead of setting their initial position, you programmed the rules of behavior that governed each boid identically. The fixed rules of the system are such that the more "cooperative" the behavior, the greater the chance of success. Individual boids aren't allowed to have any memory (i.e. stateless), so AI solutions are precluded.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/" rel="nofollow">http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/</a>
I created the Max space filler. too bad it's very volatile inside
<a href="http://gameoflifetotalwar.com/challenge/pwtOc" rel="nofollow">http://gameoflifetotalwar.com/challenge/pwtOc</a>
This is too fun. Unfortunately, seems that an excellent and simple strategy to win is to just place entire columns full of life, particularly on the front and back ends (with whatever subdivisions you can afford also).
Very cool. I made a multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life a few months ago, and it is fascinating to see how much our versions differ.<p>I dig how you are using "war" as not just a metaphor, but a game concept.
Good work, excellent fun! I don't know if it's just me but I'm finding Firefox has the "I'm ready for battle" button disabled on first load of the challenge page.
Cool idea. Maybe make it easier to get started, it's a bit unclear initially what to do. Also, maybe have a mini version where you just place 20-30 armies instead of 100.
This looks like a more organized version of <a href="http://lifecompetes.com" rel="nofollow">http://lifecompetes.com</a>, which is itself a LOT of fun.