TITLE: The World's slowest Conway's Game of Life
NAME: Ulf Schreiber
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: ulf.schreiber@gmx.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.fen.baynet.de/ulf.schreiber/
TOPIC: Microcosms
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: conway.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1 W95


TOOLS USED: 
    nothing? Well cmpeg, and some various ones for viewing and list
                   building..
         

CREATION TIME: 
    rendered multistep, about 12 h,
               writing: 2 months idle - 2 days stress


HARDWARE USED: 
    K6/250 oc'ed, plus a cluster of SGIs, which sadly only appeared
                            in my dreams..


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


Conway's Game of Life is the classic alife system. It consists of several simple
cellular automata which die, live or get born depending upon the number of
neighbours in the precessing generation. It is very simple to program, even in
pure 3.1 pov. (A big thanks for 3.1 to the team!!!)




VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    ActiveMovie and ATI's player (at least with some
                  preview anims) testet.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


A 10x10 conway matrix, displayed in various ways, controlled by some few clock
dependant variables which are collected together in one central #macro group. 

The conway part stood shortly after the round was announced, but at that time
the only output was in #debug... Then came the interface that gives the conway
data a useful format for options input and scene output. This also meant making
"soft" transitions between generations spanned over several
frames. Comparatively much work went into this. As you can obviously see, not
too much brain power, neither of mine nor of my CPU, was spent on the final
optical representation. 
If I just startet earlier... 
Plans were to make the blobby part moving into a rotating torus formation, to
make the "warping" (in the meaning of the "bomb 3.2" game classic) edges of the
field really fit together. (and of course to have a very catchy animation
poster ;-)

Actually, a lot of the code is aimed at other planned features, like
animation-secure randomness applied to individual cells, which are never used
but make the .pov quite extensible.