A few months back, I made a Multimode Game of Life (GoL) that could do the usual GoL, a mode with two populations coexisting, a mode where one population competed out a second (inspired by #BLM), and a mode, relevant to this discussion, showing the spread of disease through a population (I wonder what inspired that).
Still a few months to go in the year
Yet, 2020 still had a few tricks up her sleeve. The US president (and everyone around him) tested positive for COVID. The suspicion is that an event at the Rose Garden to announce his pick for US Supreme Court justice, where folks were packed in and almost all without masks (see image below), was the start of a super-spreader event.
And then Joey Castillo sparked a thought.
That inspired me: could I change the starting conditions of my GoL contagion mode to reflect this event?
Indeed, I could.
How did I do this?
In the process of building the multimode version, I designed a UI (though, didn’t implement it). The UI required making and positioning bitmap sprites on the matrix grid. To figure that out, I created a spreadsheet with a 16×32 frame that I could layout the UI elements and understand what bitmaps to make and where to position them.
Worked great.
So I figured, I could use this grid to layout a Rose Garden event. And here’s my first attempt. Rows of closely packed attendees, two people on a podium, press corps on one side, some military folks on the other (go check the image above), and one in particular is infected.
And rather than being smart and programming something to convert these pixels to an array, I just typed the values in and dragged the numbers around to fill in all the cells with the right value. Then I brought the values into Word, where I am more comfortable with manipulating text, to create the two starting arrays for the animations (one for the live population, one for the infected population).
I had to tweak the starting condition to be dramatic enough (and please my wife), but was able to get a fun starting condition that looked like the event, and that has that 2020 Super-Spreader feel as everything goes red.
Haha.
Full video below.
