WiiLife

WiiLife
File:Wiilifewii.jpg
General
Author	drei000
Type	Math
Version	20080728
License	Currently Freeware
Last Updated	2009/01/04
Links
Download

WiiLife is an adaptation of Conway's Game of Life for the Nintendo Wii. It allows users to observe the evolution and death of a random population of cells. The game features zooming and scrolling capabilities, and also allows users to create new random populations or test out their own patterns. Despite being in an early stage of development, the program may occasionally crash, as the developer has yet to verify that all boundaries are properly checked. The program also requires improvements in speed, and the developer is considering different algorithms to achieve this.

About

The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton.

The game is actually a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, needing no input from human players. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.

The initial pattern constitutes the 'seed' of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed — births and deaths happen simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. (In other words, each generation is a pure function of the one before.) The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Controls

Wiimote	Action
Wiimote DPad	Move around while zooming
Wiimote A Button	Edit Mode On/Off
Wiimote B Button	Normal Mode: Generate new (random) population Edit Mode: Set/Unset Cell
Wiimote Plus Button / Wiimote Minus Button	Zoom In/Out
Wiimote 1 Button / Wiimote 2 Button	Decrease/Increase Speed
Wiimote B Button + Wiimote DPad	Change size of randomly populated area
Wiimote B Button + Wiimote Plus Button / Wiimote MinusButton	Change cell density
Wiimote HomeB utton	Quit

Screenshot

Taking Screenshots doesn't work at the moment (maybe quite useless anyways), but it looks quite similar to this, just the colors inverted:

Changelog

2008.07.28

• Edit Mode finally here. Press A and draw Cells by Point&Click. Press A again and see what happens :)

2008.07.27

• Adjustable Cell density and size of randomly populated area

2008.07.26

• icon.png and meta.xml added to .zip
• Speed can now be slowed down and speed up again (starting speed is maximum speed at the moment)
• Initial pattern changed to Gosper's Glider Gun
• Fewer living cells in random populations

2008.07.25

• Initial Release / edit: resized the area where cells start so that they have some space to evolve :)

To Do

• Improve Controls
• Save & Load Patterns (support for common Life file formats)
• Optimize Code for Speed. Optimize Wiimote Code. Optimize Code in general. Code is a mess ;)
• Larger Universe(?)
• Change Rules (already in code, but no menu for it...)
• Remove unneeded header files

External links

• Wiibrew - https://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiLife