Welcome to the Spark Game of Life!
July 13, 2016
People have been asking us – how do you use the Cisco Spark APIs? At Cisco Live! Berlin, Cisco DevNet attendees met the Spark Game of Life for the first time – one of our favorite early examples of the Spark platform APIs at work.
The Game of Life is simple. It harnesses the power of a team (what Cisco Spark is best at) and gets them to play with our APIs through a simple game. No code lessons necessary, just use a simple slash command message in the Spark game room and the Game of Life controller makes your next move for you.
The Spark Game of Life was a joint effort with our friends at Chaotic Moon. I’ll pass the mic over to Christian Primozich, Software Architect, to tell you a little more about how the game works and what it's all about.
It’s been a lot of fun watching people play this game for the first time. At Chaotic Moon, we’re in the business of making cool companies even cooler. We’re psyched to see that the Spark Game of Life is helping new audiences come to love Spark as well as its powerful APIs through a true team effort between us and the Spark team. Also, we know developers appreciate a little nerdy flair so an old school gaming interface was most surely going to stop traffic.
The Spark Game of Life is built on the concept of the original game of life by John Horton Conway. In the Spark version, you play pieces on the board (called cells) while the computer combats your teams’ every move. After the end of the game session, the algorithm generates the cells and you watch as the cells grow and grow and grow until the game determines a winner – people or computer!
This was perhaps the most fun. We took a popular early-days computer science game and gave it a spin that was relevant to nerds and Spark fans alike. Cells have names like sparky, felix, and peter (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit, of course)! And the algorithm? Well, we can’t quite tell you that. You’ll have to play it for yourself at Cisco Live! Berlin or at our next event to see how the Spark Game of Life works. Do you have what it takes to win?
Christian Primozich, Software Architect at Chaotic Moon, also contributed to this post