The LifeGenes project for genetic cellular automaton adds genetic inheritance and various traits to the cells in Conway's Game of Life. This is accomplished primarily through golly's python scripting interface.

This is a highly collaborative project in progress originating from /r/collaboratecode; please don't hesitate to fork, send pull requests, report issues, or ask questions! For help and more information check out the wiki, our google+ community, or the tentative project outline.

Current Cell Traits

• color - expressed using a 256 state layer using custom golly rule 'constant.table'
• Neural network based AI which determines cell movement

Planned Cell Traits

• mass/speed movement rules
• Neural network based AI which releases/recieves inter-cell communication signals (i.e. chemoreceptors)

Getting Started

1. install golly & Python - These scripts must be run from within golly (v2.5 tested) and you need python v2.7 (v3.3 has known compatibilty issues with golly) to run them. Start out by installing and playing around with those two a bit if you aren't already familiar.
2. place scripts and rules where golly can find them - find golly's install directory and then merge our 'golly' folder with the install directory (called 'golly' by default). HINT: golly's home directory will be something like '/usr/share/golly' for ubuntu or 'C:\Program Files\golly' for windows. The file structure should be properly set up to make sure all scripts, rules, and patterns end up in their right place.
3. Load the scripts in golly - from golly's python instructions: To run one of these scripts, tick the Show Scripts item in the File menu and then simply click on the script's name. You can also select one of the Run items in the File menu. NOTE: some more advanced scripts require additional dependencies such as the PIL library. See the Acknowledgements & Dependencies section below for details.
4. Observe genetic evolution in action!

Want to Contribute?

Please do! You may want to check out my python style explanation for details on how/why this project deviates from PEP8.

You can start by modifying scripts - golly's python instructions contain golly's python scripting documentation. Note that golly can get confused after experiencing a python bug and persistant errors while debugging can sometimes be fixed by restarting golly. Similarly, imported files will not get re-imported when re-running a script unless golly restarts.

Then check our github issue tracker for bugs or enhancements which need fixing.

Acknowledgements & Dependencies##

The following dependencies are required for running some scripts in the package, and you must install them if you wish to use those scripts.

• PIL - Python imaging library is for using images with Tkinter to create GUI elements such as the genetic cell painter pallate. Win32 binaries and source for linux can be found on the linked project page. Additional binaries (including 64bit) can be found here, and alternative source can be found in the Pillow repo.

The following dependencies are packaged into the LifeGenes.lifegenes_core.__util directory and no setup or worry about them is needed, but they help make this work possible and merit mention here:

• appdirs - "A small Python module for determining appropriate platform-specific dirs". Used under permission of the MIT License.