For this week’s assignment, I wanted to play with the different visual illustrations of the game of life. Also, I wanted to add the mouseDragged() function as an element of interaction. Here are the different versions:
- For this one I experimented with a different shape and background color. The circle in a square shape creates an effect like the simulation would be eating up the canvas, almost like it got infected.
2. In this one, the rules are altered a little bit which creates an interesting pattern as the simulation spreads.
3. For this one, I wanted to keep only the birth and the death of the cells. This allows to focus more on the different shapes created by the simulation, especially in the beginning.
4. This one was my favorite. Although very similar to the 3rd, the rules are different slightly which makes the simulation to die out sooner. I imagine this to be interesting to explore with real-time human movements instead of mouse dragging. Combining the game of life simulation and the body movements would make it an organic interactive experience.
The tricky part was figuring out how to connect the mousePressed() or mouseDragged() into the simulation. After a lot of thought about why it did not work, apparently, the missing piece was in the rules of the game of life. In general, the most interesting part was playing with the different rules. For instance:
// this is the 4th sketch:
if (board[x][y].state == 1 && neighbors > 0) {
board[x][y].state = 0;
// this is the third sketch
if (board[x][y].state == 1 && neighbors < 0) {
board[x][y].state = 0;
The only difference is the more or less than 0 but it creates a very different visual effect. To sum up, this assignment was an interesting exploration of the different visual possibilities of the game of life.