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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news:413b0f7e@news.povray.org...

> 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 :/

Why don't you do this:

#declare Foo=array[3][3]
{
    {1,2,3},
    {4,5,6},
    {7,8,9}
}

--
- Nicolas Alvarez
nicolas [dot] alvarez [at] gmail [dot] com

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On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:07:34 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> 
> 

> news:413b0f7e@news.povray.org...
> 
>> 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 :/
> 
> Why don't you do this:
> 
> #declare Foo=array[3][3]
> {
>     {1,2,3},
>     {4,5,6},
>     {7,8,9}
> }

Because I didn't want to have something fixed like this. To change the
size of the world with this system you would have had to completely change
the declaration of the array... and directly editing 30x30 arrays like
this isn't really convenient.

This isn't a problem anymore anyway, since the starting values can now be
taken from a picture.

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Hi!

The moment I saw this, I knew that I must try to code that myself. So I did. Here is
one of my images. More at
http://home.arcor.de/mad_onion/life/

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Attachments:
Download '003-life.jpg' (185 KB)

Preview of image '003-life.jpg'

Manuel Kasten wrote:
> The moment I saw this, I knew that I must try to code that myself. So I did. Here is
one of my images. More at

Also very cool. I need to scrounge the time to build an animation of 
Life growing. R-Pentamino, anyone?

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> Well I posted it, maybe someone else is interested. I've already
> done a program which could probably have been modified to output something
> usable by POV, but I'm not very experienced at parsing external files with
> it... and it was funnier to do it completely with POV :D

In most cases outputting the final SDL as an include-file from your 
program is the easiest way to go.

HTH,
Florian
-- 
Optimum Requirement #1: You are Linus Torvalds
(WEB.DE help-wanted ad: Linux Guru)
[------------ http://www.torfbold.com - POV-Ray gallery ------------]

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On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:27:26 +0200, "Manuel Kasten" <kas### [at] gmxde>
wrote:

>Hi!
>
>The moment I saw this, I knew that I must try to code that myself. So I did. Here is
one of my images. More at
>http://home.arcor.de/mad_onion/life/
>
>

Woa.  Offshore drilling rig meets Lego  :D
Neat!

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--------------( oo )--------------

Hi SS,

I was working with CA's longtime ago on POVray. I had the same problems that
you mention. I started to do CA's simulation in 3D and I tried to render
500x500x500 with a text file to remember the array.  This strategy was
uncomputable (very too long). Then, I used java directly to produce a
parsable file with the strict minimum for povray. The simulation is done in
Java (fast) and it could be exported to POVray.

Here's some examples;

http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/gPov00.avi
http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC3D-Stack.mpg
http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC-XVID.avi

--------------( oo )--------------
guillaumeLaBelle [alias goo?] - Architecture CAAO Website[VIF]-514.524.3010
http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/indexB.htm

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Attachments:
Download 'aC153.jpg' (164 KB) Download 'aC037.jpg' (213 KB)

Preview of image 'aC153.jpg'

Preview of image 'aC037.jpg'

> Hi SS,
> 
> I was working with CA's longtime ago on POVray. I had the same problems
> that you mention. I started to do CA's simulation in 3D and I tried to
> render 500x500x500 with a text file to remember the array.  This strategy
> was uncomputable (very too long). Then, I used java directly to produce a
> parsable file with the strict minimum for povray. The simulation is done
> in Java (fast) and it could be exported to POVray.
> 
> Here's some examples;
> 
> http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/gPov00.avi
> http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC3D-Stack.mpg
> http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC-XVID.avi

Nice, I just thought I should try to create an include file with an
external program, to see the improvement in parsing time. I modified a bit
the program I made some time ago in D for standard 2D cell automata...
parsing a 50x50x100 world in POVRay took 35s while writing a 500x500x100
include file (289MB !) with my program took 11s (0.037s for a 50x50x10
world and 43s for 500x500x500) :D

But still, it was not as fun as doing everything in POV ;)

And... well SS reminds me of not so funny things, maybe I shouldn't
capitalise the second S...

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--------------( oo )--------------

Thousand of excuses, SeeSchloss

Sometimes shortkuts (SK) produces undesirable effects. Sorry for the SS, it
was naive, and when I see those two letters together, I don't think to the
SS.

> But still, it was not as fun as doing everything in POV ;)

Some time ago I was more active on PovRAY, but maybe less today. I find
others programming languages more complete and effective. Everything that is
geometry related  (Vector override operators - Rotations - Matrix
transformation) miss me a lot. Then, why did you switched to Exclusivly
PovRAY?

Regards,

--------------( oo )--------------
guillaumeLaBelle [alias goo?] -
Architecture CAAO Website[VIF]



"SeeSchloss" <adr### [at] seeschlossorg> wrote in message
news:pan### [at] seeschlossorg...


>
> > Hi SS,
> >
> > I was working with CA's longtime ago on POVray. I had the same problems
> > that you mention. I started to do CA's simulation in 3D and I tried to
> > render 500x500x500 with a text file to remember the array.  This
strategy
> > was uncomputable (very too long). Then, I used java directly to produce
a
> > parsable file with the strict minimum for povray. The simulation is done
> > in Java (fast) and it could be exported to POVray.
> >
> > Here's some examples;
> >
> > http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/gPov00.avi
> > http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC3D-Stack.mpg
> > http://ingallian.design.uqam.ca/goo/VDO/aC-XVID.avi
>
> Nice, I just thought I should try to create an include file with an
> external program, to see the improvement in parsing time. I modified a bit
> the program I made some time ago in D for standard 2D cell automata...
> parsing a 50x50x100 world in POVRay took 35s while writing a 500x500x100
> include file (289MB !) with my program took 11s (0.037s for a 50x50x10
> world and 43s for 500x500x500) :D
>
> But still, it was not as fun as doing everything in POV ;)
>
> And... well SS reminds me of not so funny things, maybe I shouldn't
> capitalise the second S...

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