DDTe4 Hours 13 to 15 - Cancer

This is the third (the first two parts were released last week) of a four part article covering the creation of my implementation of Conway's Game of Life. This week I am adding Cancer to the game.

I am not really sure why I decided to add cancer to the game of life. Perhaps it is my strange way of mourning over the loss of my mother or perhaps all the research into cancer that inspired me to create my own version of Conway's Game of Life was still in the back of my mind when I realized that I still had plenty of time to work on the project and add new features.

In the real world there are a number of causes for cancer but ultimately it comes down to either mutation or cell damage. I am limiting the simulation to only one of the two causes for cancer. For simulation purposes, mutation happens with newly formed cells. These are the ones that appear when an empty cell is surrounded by three (and only 3) living cells. Cell Damage is what happens to aging cells so is applied to any cell that is over 10 generations old. The mutation or damage is determined purely through randomness with an odds variable indicating how likely the cancer starting is. The odds value is a floating point number between 0 and 1 just like the numbers provided by the random number generator making the check simple as it is just seeing if the random number is less than the odds.

The problem with using random numbers in a simulation is that it makes it impossible to re-create the cancer. This problem can be solved by the fact that the random numbers are not random but are instead pseudo-random and the sequence of random numbers is repeatable if the original seed number is known. JavaScript doesn't let you seed the random number generator, so to do this you would have to find or write your own random number generator. For such a short time limit on this project, however, that is not realistic so cancer in this simulation will be unpredictable like it is in the real world.

This leads to the problem of how to deal with the growth of the cancer. There are three growth modes in the game. The mode you want real cancer growing in is benign which is simply no growth. Spreading mode is a slower growing form of cancer in which cells that are about to die but that are next to cancer will become cancerous. Growing mode is the evil mode where the cancer will grow into any dead cells next to it.

My initial tests had the simulation treating cancer cells as if they were dead cells. This was the ideal way from a coding perspective to implement the cancer as no drastic changes to the core simulation engine were needed. However, when I watched the cancer progress it just did not have the correct feel. It simply did not seem to grow properly. I altered the code to treat cancer as being alive and ran the simulation again. The results were almost exactly what I was looking for. I simply loved the results of both spreading modes.

From a performance perspective, there was a bit of a hit from the cancer, but not an overly dramatic hit until the cancer started to grow. The hit from the growing cancer is simply the drawing problem that was discussed in the previous article. Too many cells on the screen causes the rendering code to constantly change the drawing color and the HTML 5 canvas has an extremely inefficient way of setting colors.

Having the growth of cancer slow down the simulation is not that big of a concern, but with at least one more hour that I would like to put into this project spending some time speeding up the overall simulation would be a worthwhile endeavor.