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MASON is a fast discrete-event multiagent simulation library core in Java, designed to be the foundation for large custom-purpose Java simulations, and also to provide more than enough functionality for many lightweight simulation needs. MASON contains both a model library and an optional suite of visualization tools in 2D and 3D.

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Tutorial 2: Life 
By Sean Luke



[Tutorial 1 documentation]   [Tutorial 2 documentation]


Tutorial 2 is a simple visualization of the John Conway's Game of Life, later popularized in a column by Martin Gardner.  Life is a two-dimensional totalistic cellular automaton, where each cell in the grid simultaneously decides to be "alive" or "dead" based on the following rules:


If a cell has less than live two neighbors (up/down/left/right -- no diagonal neighbors), is dead in the next iteration, presumably of loneliness.
If a cell has more than three live neighbors, it is dead in the next iteration from suffucation.
If a live cell has two or three live neighbors, it stays alive in the next iteration.
If a dead cell has exactly three live neighbors, it comes alive in the next iteration.


The initial conditions of the automaton are set to Martin Gardner's so-called  B-Heptomino.  More on Life from Paul's Page and from MathWorld.

Where is Tutorial 1 in the simulation list? Tutorial 1 is a command-line example only, with no GUI.

Note: this description is different from the one which appears after following the tutorial documentation.  This is because the tutorial documentation overrides the getInfo method to provide a description.  If this method is not overridden, MASON instead tries to display a file called index.html stored in the same directory as the simulation (which is what's going on here).