-
Background
LifeWars is a competitive two player variant of John Conway's famous Game of Life (also known as Life). Life is a cellular automaton, where a series of rules describe how 'live' cells propagate or diminish over a grid. The precise rules that govern these activities can be seen here. Life is a 'game' that only requires an initial input from the player to establish a starting pattern of live cells, after which the rules of Life take over (in a way that often cannot accurately be anticipated at the start, without prior experience using the same pattern).
Competition
These rules can easily be extended to allow for two interacting players (red and blue), where one attempts to out-compete and outgrow the other. This is the basis of LifeWars, a competition launched at Bristol University for the 2015-2016 cohort of MSc Computer Science students (62 individuals).
Structure
Grid size: 150 width, 90 height, wrap-around
Starting pattern, initial live cells: 99
Total time steps: 5000
No. of matches between two players: 50
Starting pattern, x, y offset: randomised
As an entrant to this competition I decided to program a genetic algorithm, which minics the rules of biological evolution, to determine an optimum starting pattern for Life (to occupy the largest number of grid cells after 200 time steps). A fitness evaluation at 200 timesteps (as opposed to 5000) was chosen merely to speed up the algorithm. The images below chart the evolutionary process of this pattern, named Chaos.
Chaos, Generation 10 - (Blue = starting pattern, 99 cells. Green = after 200 timesteps, 948 cells)
Chaos, Generation 80 - (Blue = starting pattern, 99 cells. Green = after 200 timesteps, 1598 cells)
Chaos, Generation 375 - (Blue = starting pattern, 99 cells. Green = after 200 timesteps, 1727 cells)
The live tournament took place during a lecture in October 2015, before which the top four entrants had already been established (Chaos included). Chaos consistently (and often substantially) out-competed the other opponents (it was great to watch!). As a result I feature on the C Programming module web page as the winner of the 'Lifewars' competition.
A video is provided below to illustrate the first of the 50 matches between Chaos and the pattern that won second place (in this video the competitor pattern has been referred to as Red).
