How cliche, right? It's true though; I have far too many ideas that I want to work on, which makes it very difficult to focus on just one. Last night, however, it occurred to me that a public forum for me to display my work would be very helpful. Maybe, just maybe, if I know that strangers around the globe are looking over my shoulder, I'll actually find the drive to see my projects through to completion one by one.

I have many projects that I've been working on over the past few months, and I've decided to now focus on the one I most recently started. Think Conway's Game of Life, but with complex interaction and rules governing behavior, as well as compound creatures comprised of multiple cell types bound together. My main goal here is to produce something which, by the power of "natural selection", produces interesting, visible and self-sustaining structures with distinct behavioral patterns.

My first attempt at this project has been in three-dimensional space; the results of this are interesting, but have proven (not shockingly) to be difficult to scale. The next version of this, which I will now focus on (and post screenshots of in the near future), will be in a 2D environment, with "blocks" of two-dimensional space existing on separate computers. Although regions of space in my simulation will be spread over a network, interaction between them will appear seamless to those viewing the "universe".

Now that I've laid out my plans on a high level in a more public setting, perhaps I ought to get to work at producing something that will actually have interesting screenshots .

~~ Alex