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favicon Through Cells / digdeeper3 (play dev on itch)

Play development build on itch.io: ndry.itch.io/through-cells / on GitHub Pages: ndry.github.io/digdeeper3

Game screenhot

The game is an indie-research project, attempting to explore cellular automata worlds in a citizen science manner.

For this purpose, the game submits successful game solutions to a server. The solutions are then instantly publicly available and analyzable.

The research

The goal of the research is to find elementary cellular automata with emergent behavior.

Elementary emergent system is a system with very few rules but still an ability to exhibit complex behavior. Like in Wolfram's class 4 behavior of simple computational models, defined as "...neither completely stable nor completely chaotic. Localized structures appear and interact in complex ways."

Elementery cellular automata are a good example of elementary systems. Obviously, not all elementary systems are emergent -- very few are.

The hypothesis is that the emergent systems are fun to explore, and vice versa -- the fun systems are emergent.

So, let a system manifest an explorable world. If someone among all possible worlds finds a fun world, and the game broadcasts it to others, and endorses others to compete in exploring it, then the most interesting worlds will bubble up -- and those would be derived from the emergent systems.

The game is an attempt to do just that.

The lore and the glossary

There is a universe to explore and map, and the player is a cartographer.

The universe consists of Worlds defined mainly by Cellular Automata. Not all Worlds are fun to explore, so collectively the cartographers are looking for the ones that are.

The Basecamp is a common space for the players to share their findings.

The Dropzone defines a point in the World - the parameters to generate the specific instance of the Cellular Automaton (mainly, the seed).

The Trek is a player-made path through the World.

The Drop describes the player and the Dropzone. The Drop is a single play attempt.

The Sight is a computed state, all the data available to the player at a given step of the Trek. Generally, the way Sight is computed defines how the player plays.

The Copilot is a non-player companion, kind of AI to automate the mundane routes and help the player to explore the World.

Cellular Automata

The World is defined by a Cellular Automaton and a set of parameters to interpret the Cellular Automaton output.

Should the World be fun or not is defined by the specific Cellular Automaton rule. So, generally we randomize the rule and try to pick a good interpretation.

The cellular automata here are 1-dimensional 3-state cellular automata, with neighborhood of 4 cells: the current cell (a), the current cell one step back (b), 1 cell to the left (c) and 1 cell to the right (d):

    t-2: ......[b]......    <-> space,
    t-1: ...[c][a][d]...     ↓ time
                ↓
    t+0: ......[x]......

and are defined by a full transition table of (3 states) ^ (4 cells) = 81 transition table entries = a 81-digit ternary number.

The Cellular Automaton is then infinitely unrolled in time to form a 2-dimensional open-ended rectangular structure

Implementation Versions

Aiming consistent data aggregation and comparison, the implementations are versioned.

The same Cellular Automata impmentation version (like digdeeper3/ca@1) means comparatible cellular automata in Basecamp (and generally within different games).

The same Sight implementation version (like digdeeper3/sight@1), given the same world, means

  • comparability of the scores in the Basecamp
  • aggregatability of the Treks for the Copilot

Build

npm i

npm run build

Find built app in ./dist/ folder.

Run dev locally

npm i

npm run start

Go to http://127.0.0.1:8434/