More Cellular Automata

I'm back after a little more developing on my CA program, (see my previous post entitled 'Cellular Automata'), and a very educational conversation with reddit user /u/slackermanz, someone with much more experience making cellular automata that me. (Seriously, look at /r/cellular_automata, they have some very impressive patterns on there, and most of them are made by /u/slackermanz).

The modifications I have made to my program are making it such that each cell will not move, but will be able to eat cells in its near vicinity, and reproduce in a random direction. As mentioned previously, I implemented an energy value, which each cell starts out with, and if they run out of energy, they become food for other cells. If the cell has an excess of energy, they will reproduce. This produces the following pattern.

As you can see, there is an exponential expansion, and I am working to minimize this, since I think there will be more interesting patterns in an energy starved environment.

Another problem I am working to fix is an over-lapping of cells. Somehow in my code, multiple cells are able to occupy the same space, which is causing an over-creation of cells and lagging my program. I believe to make this more efficient, I will initially spawn cells for all spaces, then have my program set the cells in a state of dead, alive, or food, that way the number of cells is constant.

As always my code is on my github. Stay tuned for these modifications and optimizations in the near future, until then, thanks for reading.