Expanding Ideas

At the beginning of this project my intentions were pretty simple, make a nifty program to help me learn processing. As I started looking into it more and more the idea of simulating life started to grab ahold of me. John Conway’s the game of life was one of the more major influences, but I felt as though could not just copy his experiment. Instead I decided to go in a different direction with a different set of rules, therefore simulating a different subsection of life. My program aims to show how cultures interact and spread ideas.

The rules were simple. One, the user would click a color and then 2 points thus creating a line. Then repeat this process to create another line of a different color. Once these lines are created the program will start cycling, on every other cycle all non-interrupted end points will generate 2 branches that will extend in a randomly generated direction, for a randomly generated length (somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 the previous lines amount ). The new branches will also be lighter than the original

When a line runs into another line segment that line will influence the hit line; averaging the RGB values in the affected line. Additionally while the branches cannot affect the “parent” line they will propagate the new values to their children (i.e. averaging the values of the new parent color and the child color). Also once a line hits another, the initial line will stop spawning branches, but its color values are kept somewhat intact through its combination with the other line.

This embodies the spread of ideas and ideals through cultures, as each new generation spreads they keep an idea from the previous generation, but usually a bit less. What they do with this information is the interesting thing, striking into new and different areas, spreading their ideals and ideas. And when cultures meet there is always a big shift in those cultures, a combining  or spreading of ideas.

Citations:

“John Conway’s Game of Life” accessed April 10, 2012, http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

“John Conway Talks About the Game of Life” modified May 27, 2007, accessed April 10, 2012, http://thinkorthwim.com/2007/05/27/john-conway-talks-about-the-game-of-life/

“Proccessing” modified 2012, accessed March 21,2012, http://processing.org/copyright.html