acm3366 wrote:Hi, I'm a highschool student and I'm writing my IB maths exploration on Chaos theory. I thought I could use Conway's game of life as a way to represent the Butterfly effect so I downloaded the Golly program, but I need a way to save all the results in one table on excel so I don't have to copy the results one by one. Can anybody help me ?
The question isn't quite clear. Are the "results" patterns? Beginning and final patterns, or every step along the way, or something showing the progressively increasing differences when you make a smallest-possible change at T=0?
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this rule, which effectively runs two Life patterns simultaneously -- say, two very nearly identical starting configurations -- and uses four different colors to show the growth of the Butterfly Effect region.
It's just a few minutes' work to adapt one of my conversion scripts to export something like DoubleB3S23 to Excel, but you'd have to be much more specific about what your input data and desired output data would be.
acm3366 wrote:Also, can anyone recommend me a couple of patterns that will show perfectly the Butterfly effect?
You could generate minimally-different small patterns at random and be pretty sure of coming up with decent examples. The example that occurs to me offhand is below.
In each of these five-cell patterns, four cells the same, and the fifth is moved to a new location, one cell away or three cells away from its neighboring variant (depending on which pairs of patterns you're comparing). One pattern is a still life (
boat), two are gliders, and one is the highly explosive
R-pentomino:
Code: Select all
x = 34, y = 33, rule = B3/S23
b2o28b2o$bobo27bobo$bo30bo28$b2o28b2o$2o28b2o$bo30bo!