Add a Project page for Cellular Sprites (#140)

Reference: #138

projects/_posts/2020-03-31-cellular-sprites.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Postscript: Cellular Sprites"
+date: 2020-03-31
+category: projects
+comments: true
+author: "LJ MIRANDA"
+header-img: /assets/png/general/cellular-sprites.png
+tags: [jupyter notebooks, streamlit, procedural generation, streamlit, seagull, cellular automata, pixel art, 8-bit, sprites]
+description: |
+    Come and generate your own 8-bit sprites using cellular automata! This
+    project was built using Seagull, my Python library for Conway's Game of
+    Life, and Streamlit.
+excerpt: |
+    Come and generate your own 8-bit sprites using cellular automata! This
+    project was built using Seagull, my Python library for Conway's Game of
+    Life, and Streamlit.
+---
+
+Almost a year ago, I wrote a library for Conway's Game of
+Life—[Seagull](https://github.com/ljvmiranda921/seagull). It's a fun
+project that serves as an outlet for my interests in [cellular automata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton).[^1]
+This year, I used it for generating procedural art:
+
+<!-- add examples -->
+![](/assets/png/general/cellular-sprites.png){:width="640px"}  
+{: style="text-align: center;"}
+
+In [Cellular Sprites](bit.ly/CellularSprites), you generate 8-bit sprites using
+Conway's Game of Life:
+* Any live cell with two or three neighbors survives
+* Any dead cell with one or less live neighbors becomes a live cell
+* All other live cells die in the next generation. All dead cells stay dead
+
+Note that these steps were based from
+[yurkth/sprator](https://github.com/yurkth/sprator). So all credit goes to
+him/her. In addition, the board size was first set to 4x8 before I ran the Game
+of Life Simulator. Afterwards, I flipped the board to create a square 8x8
+image. It's good that Seagull's API design allowed for these changes, and it's
+very easy to implement! You can check [this
+example](https://pyseagull.readthedocs.io/en/latest/notebooks/sprator.html#Sprator)
+on how it's done.
+
+Lastly, Cellular Sprites was a learning opportunity for me to build and deploy
+a [Streamlit](streamlit.io) application. Streamlit is awesome. I talked about
+it at length in [one of my blog posts on Jupyter
+Notebooks](https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2020/03/16/jupyter-notebooks-in-2020-part-2/#quick-turnaround-from-prototype-to-prod).
+I'm not a web-developer (I suck at frontend), but I was able to create a decent
+UI in just a day of hacking!
+
+**I suggest trying-out Cellular Sprites on your own.** Play with the parameters on
+the sidebar to create cute 8-bit sprites! If you found something cool, feel
+free to save the image and share to your friends! [(If `iframe` is not working,
+click this link to redirect you to the Heroku
+app)](https://cellular-sprites.herokuapp.com)
+
+<iframe src="https://cellular-sprites.herokuapp.com" width="700" height="600">
+  <p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
+</iframe>
+
+
+
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: In addition, I used it as an opportunity to learn and enforce [type hints in Python](https://realpython.com/python-type-checking/)