X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fd588,b4ca663923921844 X-Google-Attributes: gidfd588,public From: Valery Silivanov Subject: Re: ANIM based on cellular automation Date: 1999/12/20 Message-ID: <83l0v7$lt7$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Deja-AN: 562827048 References: <83dccd$li3$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <385A4598.7272@TAKEOUTTHEGARBAGEyahoo.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 proxy.nornik.ru:80 (Squid/2.2.STABLE3), 1.0 x43.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 172.31.9.117, 195.133.78.4 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Mon Dec 20 10:38:31 1999 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDascii_art Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art.animation X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (Win95; I) > > Is there a way that you could use one of your portraits? This one is > probably too simple and would just look like nothingness most of the > time in the animation. > > (it's a wonderful portrait on its own though) > > > Also, is there a way that you can speed up the animation? It seems a > little static. I stared briefly at the source code but can't hold my > concentration long enough to figure it out. > Hi Thanks for your reply. Your new cat animation looks very good. Re: the life game The initial picture should consist of similar characters (and the 'line style' won't be appropriate). The explanation of the rules and additional info may be found on: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~callahan/lifepage.html#myres (There are also Brian Eno's comments on it at the bottom - maybe it's interesting for somebody here). The initial picture may shrink to nothing at some point, or become periodic, or move in some direction leaving a trace of stable patterns etc. Sometimes it's really stunning. I also create a more accurate code for the life game: http://www.angelfire.com/ab/ascii/life100.html#top It's actually a neat thing named centinal, a cycle with a period 100. Unfortunately it's slow and does not look like animation. I made the Kok's galaxy faster too. Re: problems with index page It's quite strange that there were proiblems, since there is only plain html on my index page, -- the simplest possible I guess. Re: #top Thanks for the idea. I changed my site as described, although the URL became almost 2 times longer. Also, all Javascripts using document.write() still lead to unhidden advertising. All those pages on my site use layers, so I intend to get rid of ads by putting a white (=bgcolor) layer on the top of each page (anyway it is supposed that a browser will understand it in these cases) when I have time. I myself close popup windows before they show anything, so it's not quite clear if popups are more irritating than banners. Re: nlinanim.html#top I've tried the script on two PCs, and it took about 15-20 seconds for them to start the anim. It seemed ok to me. However, if it causes troubles sometimes, it's possible to reduce variables 'iterations' (ie the number of frames) and 'scale' (= cols = rows in a frame), and it still will look decent. Currently there are 70 frames of 20x20 symbols. I think potentially the 3d arrays (number of frames x size1 x size2) allow to add many effects such as playing with the order of frames, combining them, automatically adding and removing symbols etc. The problem is that it takes time to calculate everything. I haven't got an Opera available, and cannot adjust the code to it. The following remarks are from a talk by Brian Eno. In the exploratorium the thing that absolutely hooked me in the same way as the Steve Reich piece had hooked me was a simple computer demonstration. It was the first thing I'd ever seen on a computer actually, of a game invented by an English mathematician called John Conway. The game was called Life. Modest title for a game. Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we're in. It only actually has a few rules, which I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares. You won't see the squares on the demonstration I'm about to do. And a square can either be dead or alive. There's a live square. Here's another one. There's another one. There's another one there. The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the clock, the squares are going to change statuses in some way or another. The square which has one or zero neighbors is going to die, a live square that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A square which has two neighbors is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is going to give birth, is going to come alive, if it isn't already alive. A square with four or more neighbors is going to die of over crowding. These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn't produce anything very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year finessing these simple rules. They started out much more complicated than that. He found that those were all the rules you needed to produce something that appeared life-like. What I have over here, if you can now go to this Mac computer, please. I have a little group of live squares up there. When I hit go I hope they are going to start behaving according to those rules. There they go. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before. What's interesting about this is that so much happens. The rules are very, very simple, but this little population here will reconfigure itself, form beautiful patterns, collapse, open up again, do all sorts of things. It will have little pieces that wander around, like this one over here. Little things that never stop blinking, like these ones. What is very interesting is that this is extremely sensitive to the conditions in which you started. If I had drawn it one dot different it would have had a totally different history. This is I think counter-intuitive. One's intuition doesn't lead you to believe that something like this would happen. Okay that's now settled (looking at screen), that will never change from that. It's settled to a fixed condition. I'll just show you another one. I'll show you this one in color because it looks nice. A little treat. (Laughter). At the Exploratorium, I spent literally weeks playing with this thing. Which just goes to show how idle you can be if you're unemployed. I was so fascinated, I wanted to train my intuition to grasp this. I wanted this to become intuitive to me. I wanted to be able to understand this message that I'd found in the Steve Reich piece, in the Reilly piece, in my own work, and now in this. Very, very simple rules, clustering together, can produce very complex and actually rather beautiful results. I wanted to do that becuase I felt that this was the most important new idea of the time. Since then I have become more convinced of that, and actually I hope I can partly convince you of that tonight. Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested me. Almost the last actually, as well. (laughter). For many, many years I didn't see anything else. I saw all sorts of work being done on computers, that I thought was basically a reiteration of things that had been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elaborate. I didn't see many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple beginnings and a very complex endings. -- |--|ASCII|>-- Valery S-v, ASCII-addict ` http://www.angelfire.com/ab/ascii ` Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.