assignment six: 

For this assignment you will work alone.  However, again, you can consult others in the class if you (a) produce your own work rather than copy others; and, (b) acknowledge the others you have consulted; your acknowledgements should look something like this: "Acknowledgements: I would like to thank John Conway for teaching me the facts of life." To understand the main issue of this assignment -- visual computing -- you will need to read the Resnick and Silverman essay on Exploring Emergence.

There are two parts to this assignment:

First, after you have finished the readings, write a two-dimensional grammar for Conway's game of life. You can omit any rules that might be necessary in order to describe the last phrase that Silverman and Resnick use to explain Conway's game; namely, "otherwise it turns off." In other words, only write the rules necessary for turning a square on. And, you need write no more that 10 of these rules. Hopefully, as group, we will collectively construct the whole grammar. Remember draw your grammar with pairs of images. The image of each pair should show 9 squares in a grid shaded either black or white. The second image of each pair should show a single square that is either white or black.

Second, attempt to design a new form of "still life" for the game of life. "Still life" are those configurations of squares that remain the same after each step of the simulation. Examples of still life can be found here in Resnick and Silverman essay. If you can't find a new form of still life, try to explain to me why it is difficult. Use your grammar in your explanation.

Note that to read Rescnick and Silverman's essay and play with the examples, you will need a Java-enabled browser. However, the essay was written in 1996, so you will need a Java-enabled browser that can run circa-1996 Java. This should work on most Windows machines. It doesn't seem to work on Mac OS X, but it might work in Mac OS 9 (i.e., Mac "classic") that can be started from your OS X system preferences.