After listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 in which Brian Eno talked about his interest in John Conway's Game of life I thought it might be interesting and a good exercise to programme my own version using Flash. After I had done this I thought the next step would be to produce some kind of output other than the patterns appearing on the game board.
I then altered the programme to record when each game cell turns on or off. When a cell turns on it registers a 1 and when it turns of it registers a 0. This means that as the game progresses a binary string is produced. I then used this string to create an integer number which i use to query Wikipedia as Wikipedia articles have numeric IDs I can use the integer created to pick an article. I retrieve the article title and then use this to query Bing image search and pull through the related image. The images are scaled and added to the screen one on top of the other.
Some search terms do not yeild results as the websites that host the images will not allow the program to use them, there is also a lag time between the title being displayed and the image being retreived, this can yield pretty funny results though.
To start the game click on the yellow board to bring some cells to life, create a pattern and then click "start" the game will then take over and begin calculating which cells should live and which should die roughly according to the rules laid out by John Conway (see link above). I made a slight alteration to the formula to make each game last longer. When the game detects that no more activity is occurring it will stop and clear.
This is the first release of this programme so it is still a little buggy (the start and clear do not work perfectly) I have plans to extend the searching to videos as well and to also have some kind report at the end to show all the articles and images retrieved.
If you have any questions or comments you please contact me
All images shown are pulled from Bing using their API, I don't own any of the copyright for any image shown here.