Hexagonal Life

This has been on my to-do list for a while: create a cellular automata similiar to Conway’s Game of Life but on a hexagonal grid.
Hexagonal Life – Written in Flash, runs very slowly.

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3 Responses to “Hexagonal Life”
  1. Life in Hexagons

    www antimodal com features the classic cell simulation game on a hexagonal grid. Rainbow Hector likes hexagons….

  2. Keith says:

    Hi Brandon, I do enjoy your site. A question here about hexagonal grid boundaries *the answer to which would help my work*. In the game of life it is best to imply an infinite space – on a square grid this is simply achieved by ‘wrapping round’. I need to use a finite but boundless hexagonal grid for some theory work on animal movements, but I realise wrap around won’t work with hexagons. My thought is to make the grid on the surface of a sphere (this needs slightly curved edges to the hexagons), but then arises the problem of how to label all the hexagons on the sphere yo ‘adress’ them. Have you ever considered this sort of thing? What would you do and how did you get over the wrap around issue? All the best, Keith.

  3. Brandon says:

    With the hexlife thing I wrapped the top to the bottom and the left to the right. The equivalent shape in 3D would be a torus. With hexagons you have to make sure there are an even number of hexes in each direction, otherwise the wrapping will get distored.
    I did an experiment with turning a sphere into a flat grid, one that wouldn’t lose the “poles” and where the shortest distance would approximate a great circle. You can find sphere grid here. The individual cells are not uniform, most are squares but there are 5, 6, and 7 sided cells as well.