Cynthia Wang

The Chaos Game can be best explained by a simple fictitious story, in which a nomadic family travels halfway to a city, camps there for the night, selects another city in the morning, travels halfway there, sets up a camp, and so forth. To run the application, the user left-clicks on the screen to select the location of a city, and after 3 or 4 cities have been selected, the user then presses the button “run” to generate a simulation pattern. This resulting pattern represents the campsites that the family has left. The rules of the game were modified so that instead of traveling halfway to a city and camping there for the night, the family travels two-thirds of the way.

Conway’s Game of Life is centered around a two-dimensional grid, in which each cell represents either the dead state or the alive state. The rules of the game are as follows. A cell is “alive” when it has two or three living neighbors—any other number below or under will kill the cell. However, if a “dead” cell has exactly three living neighbors, then it will become “alive”. After successive generations, a pattern in the evolution of the changing population emerges. Focusing on color and visual experimentation, color ramp was used to record and display cell deaths as a paint gradient. Instead of assigning a specific color to show the changes between different states, color ramp was applied for both the dead and alive cases, which resulted in the changes being recorded as different colors, starting from black and ending in a light pink. Dead states are outlined in a grid-like texture.

Variation on Conway’s Game of Life without the grid-like texture outlining dead states.

Variation on Conway’s Game of Life with the alive states outlined in a grid-like texture.

Segregation indicates that agents move to a new location but do not change; assimilation signifies that agents change their identity but do not move. Depending on a single set of rules, cells can either segregate or assimilate. There are 4 types of agents (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), and simulations begin with a randomly distributed population with a 1:1:1:1 ratio for each agent. How the application works is through sensing the environment around the home and the destination, and based on preferences for certain types of neighbors, the call function will count the number of each type of agent in that specific neighborhood, and from there, the agent can either move, change or do nothing (or a combination of those 3). This case examines a 48-cell neighborhood, in which the magentas group together and the others flee, but at different rates. The cyans, preferring yellow neighbors, will move 50% of the time while the yellows, preferring silver neighbors, will move 33% of the time.

Variation on segregation and assimilation model with yellows moving 66% of the time instead of the original 33%.

Variation on segregation and assimilation model with agent mobility set to 5 instead of 200.

Variation on segregation and assimilation model with neighborhood size set to 8 instead of 48.

Variation on segregation and assimilation model with magentas maintaining the 48-cell neighborhood and other agents decreasing to an 8-cell neighborhood.