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Game of Life Links

Posted: March 5th, 2009, 3:25 pm
by Nathaniel
Rather than having an increasingly out-of-date list of links that only I (and a few moderators) can update here, the list of Life links is now maintained on this LifeWiki page.

Various useful pieces of Life software are still attached below.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 5:11 pm
by Lewis
I know of some websites which aren't on the list:

http://www.geocities.com/conwaylife/ - Pattern Statistics and software.

http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/lifepw.zip - Another pattern collection by Alan Hensel, this one includes patterns from other rules.

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/achim/gol.html

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 6:09 pm
by Nathaniel
Thanks, those have been added.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: May 30th, 2009, 7:33 am
by dvgrn
Added this link in the "Stable Life?" topic last night, then realized it wasn't in your List o' Links...

http://nickgotts-eventful.blogspot.com/

["GoL Patterns with Eventful Histories", about Life patterns that stay "interesting" (meaning unpredictable) for a long time.]

MIght also be worth keeping an eye on Golly's reference links page, at

http://golly.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc ... /refs.html

-- there are a few resources there that aren't in your list, such as Calcyman's Life pages:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/calcy/life/

(good summaries of stable technology, Corderships, and current unsolved problems).

Dean Hickerson's Life pages now have a new home at

http://radicaleye.com/DRH/

And there's an updated Hersrch with a few recently-discovered conduits and other miscellaneous fixes, at

http://cranemtn.com/life/files/Hersrch-15June2007.zip

I have some more updates to do on Hersrch, but anyway it needs a better home than buried in my pile of linkable Life junk...

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: May 30th, 2009, 2:19 pm
by Nathaniel
The list is now updated.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 2nd, 2009, 12:38 pm
by Macbi
I couldn't see http://www.yucs.org/~gnivasch/life/index.html in the list. Gabriel Nivasch's page is great, especially the still life generator, it helps no end with stabilizing "almost patterns".

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 1:30 pm
by PM 2Ring
Dean Hickerson's Life pages now have a new home at

http://radicaleye.com/DRH/
Excellent! I see Dean has a p30 glider stream bridge. I tried to build one a couple of months ago, using XOR reactions. My first attempts failed, due to off-by-one timing errors, but I eventually achieved success. However, the resultant circuit was too large to be practical. I tried a different approach a few weeks ago that is much simpler, and possibly even more compact than DRH's method. If it is, I'll post it in the Patterns forum.

My new approach is quite simple. Each p30 stream is converted to a pair of p60 streams. The four streams just have enough room to cross safely. The p60 streams are then recombined into p30 streams.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 6th, 2009, 1:48 pm
by Lewis
I've found a new website with pattern collections for a few different rules:

http://ad-ca.narod.ru/downen.htm

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 12th, 2009, 7:32 pm
by Awesomeness
Ugh... There's so many good search programs that use terminals/consoles and I don't know how to run them... I am a Java programmer. I wish someone could make a GUI version of these in Java, so everyone can use them, not just the computer savvy and people with the ability to compile C and C++.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 15th, 2009, 4:57 pm
by Nathaniel
I've uploaded a list of links to LifeWiki to avoid the middle man that is this thread:

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.ph ... Life_links

As such, I propose keeping that list as the list of "good links" (whatever that means), and this thread can be used for posting any links (your own site, single blog posts, whatever floats your boat).

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 19th, 2009, 1:15 pm
by Macbi
Are there any descriptions anywhere of the quicklife algorithm? What optimisations does it use?

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 19th, 2009, 1:59 pm
by PM 2Ring
Macbi wrote:Are there any descriptions anywhere of the quicklife algorithm? What optimisations does it use?
The Golly credits state that the quicklife algorithm uses some ideas from Alan Hensel. Maybe Andrew will post on this topic, but in the meantime, here's a link to a quick description of the algorithm Alan uses in his applet, plus links to the Java source code.
http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/lifeapplet.html

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 20th, 2009, 2:39 am
by Andrew
Macbi wrote:Are there any descriptions anywhere of the quicklife algorithm? What optimisations does it use?
Tom Rokicki wrote the QuickLife algorithm (and HashLife, and all the other algorithms included in Golly, except for RuleTable which was written by Tim Hutton). I'm hopeless at bit-twiddling and Tom is hopeless at GUI stuff, so we make an excellent team. :)

You might want to read Tom's comments in qlifealgo.h which can be found at Golly's CVS page:
http://golly.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc ... golly/src/
Or download Golly's source distribution.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: June 20th, 2009, 9:51 am
by Macbi
Andrew wrote: You might want to read Tom's comments in qlifealgo.h which can be found at Golly's CVS page:
http://golly.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc ... golly/src/
Thanks!

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 3:27 pm
by Sokwe
Personal Life pages
http://www.beluch.ru/en/life.htm - The English version of Nicolay Beluchenko's personal Life page
http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/ - Alan Hensel's Life page

Research papers
http://msri.org/publications/ln/msri/20 ... index.html - "Still Life" by Matthew Cook
http://www.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/W ... heory.html - "Still Life Theory" by Matthew Cook

You might also consider adding Summers' "Game of Life Status page" to the links.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 1:36 pm
by Lewis
http://mysite.verizon.net/live_free/glossary.htm - Has patterns from different rules (B2/S0)

I'd found similar pages to this dedicated to other life-like rules but lost them. There was one about 34-Life where the owner had managed to run a census on the rule (using a toroidal universe I think). Does anyone know and have a link to that site?

Edit: I found the site. It's http://web.mac.com/teisenmann/34life/main.html

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: November 18th, 2009, 4:39 am
by tedge
Crepuscular Life - Full resolution screensaver for Mac OS X:
http://twilightedge.com/mac/crepuscularlife/

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: February 7th, 2010, 1:23 pm
by Lewis
How do you use the programs which are .c files (eg. ofind.c)?

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: February 7th, 2010, 3:33 pm
by Axaj
Lewis wrote:How do you use the programs which are .c files (eg. ofind.c)?
You have to compile them yourself.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: February 8th, 2010, 5:21 pm
by Lewis
How do you compile them, and is any software required to compile?

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: February 8th, 2010, 5:42 pm
by calcyman
You compile them with a dedicated C/C++ compiler, like Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition (downloadable for free).

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: November 15th, 2010, 1:10 am
by Extrementhusiast
A nice link that I'm not sure should be in the LifeWiki page, as it deals with a variation that is not strictly a cellular automaton. (You'll see what I mean.)
http://www.clickmazes.com/life/ixlife.htm

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: January 15th, 2011, 4:00 pm
by knightlife
Interesting, but the algorithm is not revealed:

http://www.ramos.nl/yyfire.html#Introduction

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: January 17th, 2011, 8:47 am
by MikeP
knightlife wrote:Interesting, but the algorithm is not revealed
It looks like some kind of reaction-diffusion system. I've played with these myself - they can often give you some very beautiful emergent patterns.

It's a shame he doesn't talk about the details though.

Re: Game of Life Links

Posted: May 6th, 2011, 8:20 pm
by George Maydwell
My attempt at making a hexagonal Yin-Yang fire rule is here:

http://www.collidoscope.com/modernca/he ... rules.html