This was created for an assignment in which I had to propose a project that pushes the concepts of the course forward. I have trouble coming up with that kind of stuff. I am not motivated by "progress" in a way that would inspire a forward-thinking project. Most of my ideas are merely things I find amusing, and which are hardly useful in furthering an important idea.
Useful projects are overrated. People make things for power, money, efficiency, but rarely ever for the sake of it. I like novelties. Things that exist for their own sake, or just for fun. Things that make you think and that stimulate the imagination. And especially, things that have no easily definable purpose. Things like us!
So, after racking my brain for a week for any kind of project that moves things forward, I just made something I liked. This is a long explanation about why it vaguely relates to the course content. It's Conway's Game of Life, but very customizable. Make a grid, put some white dots on it. If there are enough white dots around a black dot, it turns white. If there are too many or too few dots around a white dot, it turns black. Simple, but with many fascinating properties.
My aim with this project is to allow people to explore the fascinating realities spawned by these simple rulesets, and to tweak those rulesets to see what happens. To me, Conway's Game of Life is pure curiosity. It creates worlds like ours simple enough to simulate and comprehend, and complex enough that we have no good intuition as to how things will behave. We have an urge upon seeing the chaos of the game to want to understand it, just as we do in real life. I hope to some day make original projects that instill a similar curiosity in players/observers, and perhaps simulate my own little universe, just because I can. I have included some presets to show off the coolest "reality from noise" configurations I have discovered.
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