oolfur

does anyone have good ideas on how to make a clever conway's game of life patch using just max objects?

i'm thinking coll + matrix, but i'm not so good at managing data within coll...

how would you make each cell in a matrix check the states of surrounding cells?

i'm sure this can be solved in a brilliant way!

how would you make each cell in a matrix check the states of surrounding cells?
i'm sure this can be solved in a brilliant way!

cellular-automata

not sure it's a clever way, but I would use two [lcd]s, and getpixel to retrieve the cells states

not sure it's a clever way, but I would use two [lcd]s, and getpixel to retrieve the cells states
aa


the result is somewhat strange, the array of numbers seems to make something a lot different from conway's game of life... any thoughts on the error here?

also, how would you translate an array of 64 numbers back into the matrix to create a loop?

the osc objects connect to a monome... i know there are some working cellular automata patches out there - but i prefer building this one from scratch.

any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
thanks!

It looks like the problem is the stage where you query the cell neighbours. When you are looking at cells on the side colums the offsets end up wrong. For example: -9 from any cell in the left row will not be a neighbour. You need to map these values properly, either wrapping the edges around or not.

This isn't the easiest thing to do in max, it's probably better suited to a text based language (perhaps javascript which you can use in max) where creating loops is simpler, or jitter where [jit.conway] does all the hard work for you. That's not to say it isn't possible. 

 is one example ready for use with the monome and below is a non-wrapping example which probably isn't as cleanly written. In max5 format currently I'm afraid.

This isn't the easiest thing to do in max, it's probably better suited to a text based language (perhaps javascript which you can use in max) where creating loops is simpler, or jitter where [jit.conway] does all the hard work for you. That's not to say it isn't possible. Here is one example ready for use with the monome and below is a non-wrapping example which probably isn't as cleanly written. In max5 format currently I'm afraid.

thanks luke! that is the most straightforward approach to this problem i've seen.

there seems to be a problem with the coll's in the neighbours subpatch... they aren't storing anything.

Oh right, sorry I thought I had them embedded. They're just the offsets needed normally (like in your patch) and for the side columns. There's probably a much easier way to go about patching this anyway. I'm waiting for my monome to arrive so I've been looking into something similar anyway. I might try doing it in javascript and see how that goes, I'll post back here if I have any success.

Mid:
0, -9;
1, -8;
2, -7;
3, -1;
4, 1;
5, 7;
6, 8;
7, 9;

this patch doesnt work in maxv4 but suddenly does when opened in max5...

does max 5 behave differently with some of the objects in this patch?

this patch doesnt work in maxv4 but suddenly does when opened in max5...
does max 5 behave differently with some of the objects in this patch?


aha, zl lookup and sum dont work in version 4.

heres a max v.4 patch with zl object replacements....

any thoughts on why it's acting strange?
the results are cool though...

Here's some replacements, haven't checked if [zl iter] or [iter] were around in max4 but these should do the job for you.