A new approach to colourised Life

[apg]

For decades, people have attempted to find a colourful generalisation of Life. Examples include Immigration, QuadLife, etc.

My solution is to have twenty-four parallel Life planes, each one corresponding to one bit-plane, offering the full gamut of 2^24 RGB colours.

This works even better for Day&Night, where *any* bicoloured pattern will behave as expected, irrespective of the choice of colours.

[hkoenig]

Instead of simple RGB, you might want to consider the HSB coordinate system (Hue, Saturation, Brightness). The Hue value is commonly thought of as an angle, while the other two vary between 0 and 100 per cent. Years ago I played around with combining the hues as vectors, with one of other values as the scalar component, and the other to show the age of the cell. You could, for example, show the age of a cell by slowing incrementing the saturation. Or when a cell dies, instead of immediately going to the off state, have the brightness decrease. Unfortunately, processor speed was much less back then, so it was incredibly slow, and I never got far with it. But with graphics processors, something like that might be possible at a reasonable speed.