Were going to look at a program now which fills the Amstrad screen with a very attractive, constantly evolving design. The patters develop according to the rules of the famous computer game of LIFE, developed by John Conway while at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Martin Gardiner spread the game throughout the world when he wrote about it in Scientific American magazine in October, 1970. In LIFE, cells are born, grow and die according to rules which Conway invented. Each cell on a grid (the colony of cells is imagined to be evolving on a grid) is surrounded by eight orders, and the state of those eight other cells dictates what happens to the cell in question in the following generation. The rules which govern the evolution of the cells are as follows: - If a cell has two or three surrounding it, it survives to the next generation
- If there are three, and just three, full cells next to an empty one, a cell will be 'born' in that empty space in the next generation
- Any cell with four or its neighbouring cells occupied dies in the next generation
Don't worry. You don't have to know the rules, as your Amstrad interprets them quite happily by itself. The rules produce patterns which are far more attractive (and far less predictable) than you could possibly imagine by reading the rules.There is just one extra twist to this program which makes it even more interesting. CELESTIA actually prints out four colonies each time a colony evolves. The original colony is in one quadrant of the screen, and the other three-quarters of the screen contain reflections of the original one. CELESTIA is incredibly effective, as you will see. Amstrad Omnibus
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