This simulation takes a 20 x 20 grid and, starting from a single occupied cell, tracks the growth of a colony of mould-like life. The 4 sliders allow you to set the likelihood that a particular occupied cell will spawn into an adjacent cell based on how many neighbours there are.
‘Disasters’ in the old Will Wright Sim games were always a fun way to understand how resilient your system was, and there are two types of disaster in this model: a ‘bleach splash’ that will poison a limited radius and fade out over time, and a ‘drought’ that will reduce growth possibilities for 50 generations and change the rules to only allow cells with 6-7 neighbours to grow. You can see how this changes your colony over the 50 cycles.
Hitting pause and scrolling down will show you some stats including the currently occupied percentage of the whole slide, a timeline of population growth and a breakdown of each cell by age. The Screenshot button will download a .png file and the ‘?’ button will give you a summary of all the functions and an explanation of how the calculations are run inside the simulation.
This was coded in Gemini and is based on an old mould simulation that I wrote in Turbo Pascal and ultimately based on John Conway’s Game of Life
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