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Agent Based Modelling in Second Life: Conway's Game of Life

Andrew Crooks, Andrew Hudson-Smith and Joel Dearden

Introduction

This model is a recreation of Conway's very well known Game of Life where cells in a square grid live or die depending on the number of neighbours they have. Wikipedia has a page detailing the model here. This is the most basic of the three models and we used this to look at the suitability of Second Life as a platform for developing agent based models.

As with all the models we have tried to visualise as much of the inner workings of the model as possible so the "thinking" and "acting" states have different colours and the number of neighbours each cell has is displayed above it so that users can get an insight into how the model works.

Example Run Movie

The movie below shows the model running:

Technical Details

A PDF document containing details about how the model was implemented is available to download:

Source Code

The Linden Scripts for this model are covered by the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE and are available to download below:

If you prefer to get up and running more quickly we have a vending machine on Nature island that will give you a complete working copy of the model when you click on it. The SLURL below will take you straight there:

Extending the Model

A three-dimensional version of the game of life is possible using these blocks if you stack layers of them, though it obviously behaves differently and you may need to change the neighbour thresholds that decide when a block lives or dies.