Pete's Log: the netViz Game of Life

Entry #1353, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 25 years old.)

netViz has a rather full-featured API. I've had some chance to play with it, but I've been getting questions about it lately that I couldn't immediately answer, so I decided it was time I write a real netViz API app from scratch. And I knew just the thing.

I decided netViz needed an implementation of the Game of Life. So I created a project with a node type called "Cell". I gave the cell node a list field with "Dead" and "Alive" options. Then I created a visual override for that field so Alive Cells showed up bright blue and Alive Cells were almost invisible.

Then I wrote an API module that plays the game of life on a grid of these cells. It's cool. And it's reasonably fast. I'm happy. It's also a cool example of our API. I think we should ship it as one of our API examples. But that's just me.