Re: ANIM based on cellular automation

>
> 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
               `<sil...@rao.nornik.ru>


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