Is there someone who has a 3D version of Conway’s game of life?
http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html
I don’t know anything of python, except that you can use in in blender, ofcourse.
would be really cool.
ehm…
Are there any people who want to code one? Doing this will create a new kind of AI, in blender.
The core of the whole idea is simple: the amount of ‘neighbours’ determines if a cell is alive or dead.
Too many and too few neighbours will cause a cell to die. If there are exactly 3 neigbours, a cell wil be come live.
So, if you align a bunch of live cells the right way, you can make some kind of creatures.
I’m sure that in 3D it will be even more amazing to see!
I don’t remember exactly where I’ve read about it, but I have heard that there have been 3D variants on Conway’s Life (which is 2D) that preserve some of the complexity of the original (you need exactly the right set of rules to have interesting stuff happen, so you can’t just automatically translate 2D to 3D). I think I’ve seen it in Martin Gardner’s Scientific American columns, or in A. K. Dewdney’s columns (he ran a successor to Gardner’s columns in Scientific American focused on computer-related math). Though Life and other “cellular automata” (as they’re called) usually take place on some sort of a grid (whether 1D, 2D or 3D) for simplicity, not like the general 3D of blender.
For something similar in spirit to Life, you might want to look at Craig Reynolds’s “Boids”, which creates a simulation of the motion of a group of birds or similar flocking creatures by giving each “boid” a simple group of rules to follow. This has been used in films such as “Batman Returns” to depict a large group of creatures without having to animate the motion of each one separately. (There’s a whole field of such simulations called “artificial life” - do a search and you’ll find lots of stuff online, including many applets.)
Sounds pretty cool go for it Loy
I think the Conway game of Life is the most interesting one, because the simple rules, but the complexity that can be achieved. For example, people have found that the game of life can be run by the game of life, itself (Where a huge amount of cells represent one cell). They can create new cells at various intervals. They can create large structures that move around.
They have created binary counters, and all sorts of other elements out of Life cells.
The hugest and most complex construction so far out of Life rules is “Catepillar”,
http://www.yucs.org/~gnivasch/life/article_cat/
It is a huge construction, featured on teh right hand side of that page. Each tiny pixel is 40 cells. Over 11 million cells make up the Catepillar. It travels orthogonally.
Just some trivia for y’all.
As Joel has said, Conway’s life is a type of cellular automata. It’s actually 3-Dimensional since the change between successive generations can be taken as the third axis.
An interesting book on this topic is by Stephen Wolfram called " A New Kind of Science" . The basic premise of this book is that simple rules can lead to very complex behaviour, that is difficult to describe analytically or by conventional mathematical techniques, and these simple rules may underlie a lot of complex behaviour observed in the natural world. The book is an interesting read.
I think I’ll make a game of life script that generates metaballs 
Here’s some cellular automata, I generated in python a while ago:
sornen, was that python script run in blender?
neat idea… maybe i try it with triangular pyramids… they have 4 sides, so the standard rules can be applied…
only the coordinates get a bit comlicated…
No the script just generates bmp files.
I wrote a script for the Game of Life in two dimensions with Metaballs.
I’m still working on the interface but as soon as that is done I’ll make the script avalible.
here is a little demo (QuickTime ~2MB):
http://home.arcor.de/wah_tak/mov/gameoflife_demo.mov
I’m also planning to add a third dimension.
lol good idea wah-tak.
Cool 
If I remember correctly there are rules also for 3D life game,
Stefano