Michael's Design Study

Virus! A project for 427

Virus! simulates the spread of a virus across a plane of red blood cells, with a mix of some white blood cells to combat the infection.

Project Outline

My Design Study is to implement a simple virus simulator and to improve the design of the application through Design Patterns and OOD principles. Virus! is a very simple animated simulator of a Virus Cell infecting a host through the red blood cells. This simulator is loosely based on real world biology but is grossly simplified for purposes of the study. This is a project for COSC427 and does not work alongside any other course, unfortunately.

Virus! Cells

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  Red Blood Cell

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  Virus Cell

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  Dendrite Cell

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  Lymphocyte Cell

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  Eosinophil Cell

Cell Rules

• Red Blood cells can be Infected
• Virus' can only infect neighboring red cells
• Virus' cannot infect White blood cells

In terms of a simple immune system three types of white blood cells exist; Dendrite Cell, Lymphocytes and Eosinophil.

• Dendrites can spawn Lymphocytes or Eosinophil (50/50 chance) cells into neighboring Red Blood Cells.
• Lymphocytes can kill neighboring viruses (and restore Red Blood Cells).
• Eosinophil cannot be infected. But does nothing more.

For some basic references see White Blood Cell

Simulator Rules

The simulator itself is totally automated, there is no user input. The simulator takes place in a Petri dish (like that in a science lab). The aim of the simulator is to see if the virus can spread throughout the petri dish, or whether the White Blood cells can destroy the Virus. Red Blood cells do nothing apart from provide positions for the Virus and White blood cells to move about.

When a White blood cell makes a move, they swap positions with the Red Blood Cell. A Virus also swaps with the Red blood cell, but converts the cell into a virus. The game plays through the following 'phases' until a winner is determined;

• White blood cells move
• Virus move

Each cell makes one move per phase (apart from Red blood cells).

Initial Design

This is a basic overview of the simulator. It shows a basic spread of red blood cells and a variety of white blood cells.

Simulator View

UML Draft

This initial draft has some similar elements from the 324 Assignment 2 (Balls), just to get it started.

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