Quantomaton

Quantomaton is a zero-player game based on Conway’s Game of Life, and a small collection of cyclic music pieces. You can think of it as a music album with a visualiser attached, or as a cellular automaton with a soundtrack.

About the game:

Conway’s Game of Life is probably the most famous example of a cellular automaton – a grid of cells that evolves through different generations based on a few simple rules. It was invented (or discovered, depending on how you look at it) by mathematician John Conway. Over the course of the game, the cells form various patterns determined by the initial configuration of the grid. Quantomaton takes the Game of Life as its starting point, and adds a quantum-mechanical twist to it.

Classical rules • All cells can be alive or dead • Live cells stay alive if they have either two or three live neighbours • Dead cells turn alive if they have exactly three live neighbours Additional quantum rules • Cells can also be in a superposition of alive and dead • Superposed cells with two or more live neighbours will be measured and turn either alive or dead, each with probability 1/2 • Dead cells with fewer than two live neighbours may go into superposition with probability 1/8192 (1/2¹³, or about 0.012%) • Dead cells with exactly two live neighbours may turn alive with probability 1/8192 (1/2¹³, or about 0.012%) • Superposed cells with fewer than two live neighbours may get measured by the environment and turn either alive or dead, each with probability 1/16384 (1/2¹⁴, or about 0.006%)

Quantomaton has two selectable modes: Classical and Quantum. In Classical mode, only the first three rules are applied. In Quantum mode, the other rules are applied as well, adding an element of chance to the game.

The neighbourhood of a cell consists of the eight cells directly around it. The playing field is toroidal, meaning that the edges of the grid wrap around so that it is continuous in all directions and every cell on the field has exactly eight neighbours. Each time a new game is started, the playing field is seeded with a random configuration, following the percentages selected in the ‘seed’ setting.

From there on, the game evolves automatically – the rules are applied to the initial configuration, then to the resulting new configuration, and so on for each subsequent generation. This is the ‘zero-player’ part – after you’ve hit the ‘start game’ button, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the show. In Quantomaton, the game plays out at a set rate of three generations per second.

About the music:

There are three pieces of music to choose from. All three are cyclic in nature, meaning that they end up back where they started to form an infinite loop that keeps going for as long as you care to watch and listen. Although the game and the music don’t influence each other, they run on the same clock and are always in step. When you select a new piece of music, the game’s options are set to values that I felt best matched the mood of the piece, but you can change them to suit your preferences. All sounds are synthesised in real time by the Arithmophone sound engine I developed for ‘Pentatone’ – a music app at the opposite end of the spectrum from this one, in that you actually play it yourself.

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