Problife: a Probabilistic Game of Life

Abstract

This paper presents a probabilistic extension of the well-known cellular automaton, Game of Life. In Game of Life, cells are placed in a grid and then watched as they evolve throughout subsequent generations, as dictated by the rules of the game. In our extension, called ProbLife, these rules now have probabilities associated with them. Instead of cells being either dead or alive, they are denoted by their chance to live. After presenting the rules of ProbLife and its underlying characteristics, we show a concrete implementation in ProbLog, a probabilistic logic programming system. We use this to generate different images, as a form of rule-based generative art.