Conway's LIVE
Wallpaper
September 2011 - The Blitz - for
Android
One of my old college friends
asked if I wanted to write a live wallpaper app
for the Android OS "for fun". Of course the first
thing that came to mind was to use Conway's Game
of Life to generate beautiful patterns! While
close inspection showed that the Android App Store
had about a dozen Conway live wallpaper apps
already, they were all rather bland to look at.
So, I wrote what I consider to be the prettiest of
them all by far. ^_^ Dragging your finger accross
the home screen of your phone leaves a trail of
"living" cells that move, grow, and interact with
each other. You can also change their shape, color
patterns, and the ruleset that governs how they
propagate, as well as the speed of the simulation.
For those unfamiliar with it,
Conway's Game of Life is an artificial life
simulation. Each single-celled critter lives or
dies based on a custom set of rules. Each rule
models a behaviour, like two neighboring cells
giving birth to a new cell, or a cell surrounded
by too many others dieing from overcrowding. The
simulation rules can create beautiful patterns,
and tweaking the rules - Which the premium version allows you to
do! - can cause even more elaborate
patterns to emerge.
Note: Since the app is no longer available on
Google Play, I have made the Premium version free
to download here. The Free Trial version with
fewer features is also here for archival purposes.
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