The unique excitement of coding something emergent

[mouser]

I've been meaning to write this post for a while -- a post aimed at new coders.

I want to write a little about the unique excitement and satisfaction that comes from writing code with the capacity to surprise you.

I think fiction writers often get this kind of satisfaction when the characters in their stories start to take on a life of their own and the writer can stand back and marvel at what happens.

There are lots of programming projects that have this flavor of emergent interactions with the ability to surprise.  Most games have this flavor, where enemies and non-player characters interact in ways that you didn't anticipate.  And of course most simulations have this flavor.

So this is my post encouraging new programmers to find a little project that is like a little simulation -- interacting components that can product outcomes that you can't predict.

Some good places to get started might be implementing Conway's Game of Life, or the Mandelbrot set, or just pick any simulation-based game like sim city and try to code the absolute simplest little form of it.

[kilele]

I've just recalled this program to design 'cellular automata', wouldn't be a nice project to make a tower defense with CA autogenerated patterns like this one
It seems to me that the app103's nany entry might have some function to autogenerate amerindian patterns this way with cellular automata.
btw I use the screenshot program from this very same author though I want to give Screencaptor a try ^^

[kilele]

Imagine a tower defense game made by the DC community this way:

- The program could allow to make 'gamified' cellular automata to find patterns usable as game elements like roads, enemies, heroes, towers, landscapes..
- Any member could submit his discovery to a dedicated website.
- The program could make 2d or 3d versions of these patterns, change colors, cartoonify...
- The program could join every pattern to be placed in the battlefield.
- The program could allow enter behavior relationships between the different ca involved in the game, such relations could be user defined or even another ca on top of all of them.
- The program could create user scores, guis, etc