SeeSchloss wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I started POVing again, and since I'm in a cellular automata period, I 
> implemented Conway's Game of Life in POVRay's preprocessing language, 
> which gives a kind of history of the 2D world :)
> 
> Everything works fine, the only problem is that I don't want to define 
> the initial state of the world in the script. Imagine the quantities of 
> lines like :
> #declare world[5][5] = 1;
> #declare world[5][6] = 1;
> ... etc :/
> So, for now I initialise it randomly (the attached picture is with the 
> seed 1789 iirc).
> 
> Do you know if I could for example read the pixel values of a monochrome 
> picture which would describe the initial state of the world ? A nice 
> thing would be to have access to a picture like if it was an array, like 
> <file>[1][56], which would be an rgb vector. That would be nice wouldn't 
> it ?
> 
> Anyway, here's a picture of a 30x30 world, with 50 steps (you can see a
> characteristic oscillator on the right) :
> 
> (ok, the environment could be improved a bit)
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
I like the idea. I remember looking at some CA stuff a few years ago. 
There's a fantastic book related to the subject called:
Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up

The book takes you through various algorithms that can used in a CA 
environment to simulate various social behaviours. I even wrote my own 
VB program to run some of the simulations. It would be great to convert 
this to POV, as then you could create some stunning animations!!


--
Reuben
reu### [at] pearsecouk

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