ESS Fall 2024 Half-Baked Game of Life tournament

Hosted by Henri Drake (@hdrake) and Isba Keshwani (@ikeshwani)

See GameOfLife.py for rules! Learn more about the diverse lifeforms that populate Conway's Game of Life from https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki.

Setting up the Python environment

This code uses a few Python packages. To install them, first download and install Miniconda (or use your conda installation if you have one), and then either:

1. Create a pre-packaged conda environment with:

conda env create -f environment.yml

or 2. Create a new conda environment manually by running:

conda create --name gameoflife python=3.12

If creating the environment manually, install the packages needed to run play_game.py and draw_input_matplotlib.py by running

conda install -c conda-forge numpy scipy matplotlib

Playing an adversarial match of Conway's Game of Life

To play a game, run

python play_game.py

By default, this game reads initial cell configurations from the BlockTest and Henri-Drake-Skrrrrt files in the entries/ folder and then allows them to evolve for 1000 time steps.

To play a game with other inputs files in the entries/ folder, simply pass the two filenames as arguments to play_game.py:

python play_game.py [File 1] [File 2]

Entering the ESS Half-Baked "Competitive Game of Life" Tournament on November 8th 2024

To enter the tournament, please create a Game of Life file named [FirstName]-[LastName]-[StrategyName] (see instructions below) and submit it to us using one of the following methods by 11:59 PM on November 7th:

1. Create a Pull Request that adds your entry (or multiple entries) to the entries/ directory of this repository on Github.
2. Send one (or more!) input file(s) to Henri Drake ([email protected])

Creating custom inputs files

You can create your own input files by running

python draw_input_matplotlib.py

and clicking on cells to toggle cells between being inactive (white) or active (black).

Placing pre-defined patterns

In draw_input_matplotlib.py, we have added the ability to load pre-existing Game of Life patterns in the conventional Run Length Encoded (RLE) format. We have placed some common example patterns in patterns/. To load in a pattern, simply run python draw_input_matplotlib.py and instead of clicking to toggle a single cell, press the A key (for "Add pattern"). Type the name of the desired pattern (e.g. glider) in the terminal prompt and hit enter. When you return to the figure, you will see the outline of the pattern under your cursor and can place it on the grid by clicking. When you are done placing copies of the pattern, simply toggle the "Add pattern" mode off by pressing the T key (for "Toggle add pattern").

The following transformations can be applied to a pattern by appending a pattern name with a period and a series of transformations, each separated by an underscore:

• rx: reflection in x
• ry: reflection in y
• r90: counter-clockwise rotation by 90°
• r180: counter-clockwise rotation by 180°

Other transformations, such as rotation by 270° degrees, can be accomplished by chaining the above transformations (e.g. glider.r90_r180 will rotate a glider first 90° and then another 180° for a total of 270°.