Application Centre Highlights
Games in Maple

As the most powerful mathematical application on the market, who would have thought that Maple also had the ability to play games? Believe it or not, three new exciting Maple games were submitted to the Application Centre in one week: Life, Mastermind® and the ever-popular Rubik’s Cube®.

Life, submitted by Björn Schäfer, is a simulation of the population growth of cells in which each cell is either "alive" or "dead." The rules of this game are simple. Cells are modelled as elements of a matrix. A new cell in the next generation is born if exactly 3 living cells surround it in the current generation, and live cells remain in that state if 2 or 3 live cells surround it; otherwise it dies. The sequence of generations can create fascinating cell-growth patterns when viewed using Maple’s matrixplot command. Maple’s random number generator was used to define the initial matrix and to determine the matrix of the next generation. Maple’s linalg package was key to generating the matrices and creating the final animation. This game can be found at http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/go?pg=H32

Mastermind®, submitted by undergraduate student Nathan Sokalski, is an interactive game that selects a random colour pattern of 5 colours from a selection of 8. The player must guess this pattern within a certain number of tries. After each try, the Maple program gives feedback until the player successfully guesses every colour or runs out of attempts. The feedback consists of white and black pegs. A black peg signifies that a colour is correct and in the correct location, whereas a white button implies that a colour is correct but in the wrong position. The plottools package is used to generate the graphics, and simple procedures run the game logic. Try this game out for fun!

Most people can reminisce on the hours spent fiddling with the Rubik’s cube. The Maple Rubik Package, designed by David Joyner and W. Knoben, simulates the moves of a Rubik’s cube®, as well as several other Rubik-like puzzles, such as Jewel®, Megaminx®, Masterball® and Skewb®. Once familiar with the commands, this interactive game can be quite a lot of fun. The authors use matrix manipulation to draw the geometric shapes and simulate the moves of the cube.
Try these games out at http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/go?pg=H32