TITLE:   Life


NAME: Byron Bashforth
COUNTRY:   Saskatchewan, Canada


EMAIL: bnb121@mail.usask.ca
WEBPAGE:   http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/~bnb121


TOPIC: Metamorphosis
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: bb_life.mpg
RENDERER USED: 

  povray 3.02 for UNIX and Windows


TOOLS USED: 

  custom software (written with VC++ 5.0)
  mpeg_encode  


CREATION TIME: 

  rendering:  80.2 hrs 
  encoding:    0.5 hrs 


HARDWARE USED: 

  1 Dec Alpha 2100 with 4 190-MHz CPUs and 256 MB of memory
  2 Dec Alpha 3000's with a 150-MHz CPU and 96 MB of memory
  1 Micron PC with 2 200-MHz Pentium-Pro CPUs and 128 MB of memory


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


  On some unnamed moon in a quiet nook of the cosmos, John Conway's Game of
  Life exists on a scale not imagined by John himself.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

  The animation was encoded to play at about 24 fps (41 seconds).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


  - i n t r o d u c t i o n -

  In the course of doing a little research into artificial intelligence a few 
  years ago, I came across John Conway's Game of Life (GOL).  More of a thought

  experiment than a game, GOL illustrates how the application of simple rules
can 
  create very complex behaviours (theoretically analogous to how simple neurons

  in our brain interact to create intelligence).

  In the Game of Life, "organisms" live and die in the cells of a rectangular
grid.
  The rules are simple:  If an organism has more than 4 neighbours alive, it
dies 
  of overcrowding.  If it has 1 or 0 neighbors, loneliness kills it.  However, 2

  or 3 neighbours is just right to keep the organism healthy and happy.  If
exactly
  3 organisms surround an empty cell (where an organism has previously died), a
new
  organism will be born in that cell.  It should also be noted that all births
and 
  deaths take place at the same time.

  Despite these simple rules, the Game of Life produces fascinating and
complicated
  patterns of interaction.  Structures seem to emerge out of the apparent
chaos.
  I've even seen boolean equations and addition circuits implemented inside
GOL.

  In this animation, a 40x40 grid was randomly initialized and the life
algorithm
  was applied.  The animation shows the progress from about the 30th to the 55th

  generation of organisms.  If you're familar with GOL, you can see a few stable

  "blocks" and "blinkers" form near the end of the animation.

  For more information, you can check out these pages (which I found useful):
    http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~d95-aeh/lifeeng.html
    http://www.mindspring.com/~alanh/life/


  - a p p l i c a t i o n -

  I thought GOL would be an interesting angle on the metamorphosis topic.  On
one
  level, you have the shape of each organism changing as it progresses through
  its life cycle.  On another level, you can see the patterns and shapes within
  the garden of organisms continually evolve.
  
  
  - c o n s t r u c t i o n -

  Custom software was written to control the Game of Life algorithm.  Within
this, 
  the software manages each organism's life cycle and each particle of "volatile

  fluid" discharged.  The program generates a POV-Ray script for each frame of
the 
  animation (there was over 1000 in total).

  The objects in the scene are straight-forward and were all modelled by hand. 

  Each organism is a lathe object that is scaled appropriately as it grows, 
  spews, and dies.  The hills in the background are painted on the inside of a 
  cylinder that surrounds the organisms and camera.

  I was very pleased with the appearance of the planet and moons through the 
  atmosphere.  This effect took me a little while to figure out...although the 
  final solution is not very difficult.  The planets are just ambiently bright,

  coloured spheres with a gradient texture layered on top of the planet
surface.
  This uppermost texture is a bright white on the _dark_ side of the planet and

  gradually changes to be completely transparent on the sunny side.  The
"atmosphere"
  is another sphere placed between the camera and the planets which _filters_
the 
  light coming from the planets.  The white areas are filtered to be the same
colour
  as the atmosphere (giving the illusion of the planet's dark side) while the
non-
  white areas of the planet appear darker through the atmosphere and show the 
  surface detail.  Finally, an ambiently bright, white sphere was placed beyond
the 
  planets in order to make the rest of the atmosphere show.  As a side note, the
gas
  giant's texture was derived from a NASA photograph (used with permission) of 
  Neptune.


  - a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s -

  Thanks to the people and system administrators of the Computer Science 
  Department at the University of Saskatchewan for tolerating the use (abuse?)
  of their computers in rendering this project.  Special thanks to the Vision
  research group (of which I'm a member) for the use of their disk space.

  Thanks to David Seal at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the photo of Neptune.
  (You can find his excellent collection of planetary maps at 
  http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/)