waTor by lemonjim
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No AI - This artwork was created entirely by hand or with traditional digital tools.
Description
waTor, a TORoidal world of WAter. Back in about 1981 I got mentioned in Scientific American for my correspondence with Martin Gardner on the subject, as this multi-species version extended the model he described in his article.
Starting with a random seed, the initial state is populated. Black for rocks, blue for water, green for plankton, yellow for fish that need to eat only plankton and red for sharks that need to eat only fish.
It develops from there.
I made the simulation in 2D, resurrected the code, inserted a pause and a beep, captured 50 raw images, opened and stacked in a single massive psd file. cropped, each image saved as a smaller still image. Then applied to a Bryce torus as a material texture, each frame rendered and saved. Assembled with GraphicConverter to a large 31MB mov, downsized with Final Cut to 480KB. Lots of frames tossed out to persuade GifBuilder to output this movie that 'rosity will accept.
Enjoy!
If you have a MacOS 9 machine, you can play with waTor. Your version won't wait and beep on each time step, it's really much zippier. But you won't have the torus mapping, just 2D and time.

Comments (6)
Cool Gif!
I have a Performa 5215CD running MacOS8.5. I will try waTor in it!
Captivating to watch!! Very creative - well done.
Too bad about the jump at the end - It almost made it all the way through one boom/bust cycle. Next modelling challenge: Include the gravitational effects for a toroidal planet.
Super cool work JIM!!!
is this an evolution of the old Life game? cool image by the way.