What happens if you change cellular automaton program Game of Life to use floating point values instead of integers? You end up with SmoothLife, a fluid and organic growth simulator.

SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway’s Game of Life – using floating point values instead of integers. This rule is SmoothLifeL which supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the ‘cords’ that join the blobs.

You can check out the paper outlining how SmoothLife works here and then grab the source code to run your own simulation here.

[via Boing Boing]

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