Hexagonal Population Game of Life

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What is This?

While typically Conway's Game of Life focuses on a square-based "game board" environment, This project explores how the classic simulation's same rules and behaviors could adapt to a hexagonal grid with cells which, unlike the typical implementation, are not just dead or alive but can have granular health, acting like populations that grow and shrink.

Rules

Each cell takes on a "population value" from 0 to 1 and, at each simulation step / generation, the population values surrounding a cell are summed. This "surrounding population value" is then evaluated against these rules:

• If this sum exceeds 3 or is below 2, the cell's population value decrements by 0.1.
• If this sum is in the range 2.5 to 3.5, the cell's population value increases by 0.1.
• All other values leave the cell's population unchanged.

Visual Representation

A population value of 0 gives a cell a white fill color (for empty). Cells with population values from 0.1 to 0.9 are grey and grow darker as their values get larger. A population value of 1 (full capacity) receives a black fill.

Source / More Info

See https://github.com/Samnsparky/HexGranularLife.

(c) 2013 Sam Pottinger.
Released under the GNU GPL v3 license.
Done for CU Boulder CSCI 4900.
Software Engineering, Emergence, and Complex Adaptive Sys.
Produced under the guidance of Professor Ken Anderson.
This presentation uses Bootstrap and jQuery.