Percy's Alife Project

I strongly recommend giving the food particles some kind of 'inertia', purely random walking tends to just produce little squiggly 'knots'.Looks very cool. How long do you think it'll take?

If you need any help with the programming, I egotistically offer my assistance. (What with being a working C++ programmer and all that). I wrote a much simpler A-life thing once, I found it very useful to be able to customise the parameters without changing the code. I'd suggest you do something similar.

My advice; don't attempt this in a language you're not familiar with. The task you've set yourself is challenging, adding additional obstacles is not wise.Java is not interpretted, it is compiled to byte code. Well written Java running on a good JIT compiler will be about 80% of the speed of C++ for a typical application. However yours is not a typical application, it is probably more processor heavy and the penalty may be higher. C# is similar in performance to Java.I strongly suggest you don't use any form of compilation to native code for any of your A-life 'organisms'.

Statistics show that working (8 hr a day) programmers take six months to get up to speed with a new language, and that code produced in that time takes longer, is buggier and is less efficent.In any case I doubt whether he'd see a big productivity push from changing to Java anyway; C++ is a good language.

With densely populated 'cellular' universes, treating it as a continous array is much more efficent. I don't know which case Percy's vision corresponds to.

Yeah, locating adjacent is much more efficent in an array structure. Now since A-life is generally heavily based on seeing what is around, this can be an important consideration. It's slightly more memory efficent too, since co-ordinates do not need to be stored.But, of course, only on a high density array.

There is no natural ordering on 3-space (or even 2-space). So you'd need to construct a search tree - probably some kind of octree, or binary space partition, to keep things fast. This can be done easily enough; but it'd still be slower than an array based system.