Life man page

[methodood]

I played Life on an old Solaris in the 90's. Can't find the Unix man page for it on the net. Did it exist ? Any idea ?
Thank you!
- - update - - It was certainly a Sun Os but not Solaris. The catch phrase is still common - no manual for life.

[Axaj]

Do you know the name of the program?

[methodood]

the name was just 'life' I'd say.

[dvgrn]

the name was just 'life' I'd say.

Could it have been Xlife? That was the standard Unix/Linux Life app until Golly came along, I think: see for example

http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/xlife.6.html

The latest stable version is on Achim Flammenkamp's website. Xlife is a classic "project that got away" -- there are versions packaged with umpteen different flavors of Linux, with different version numbers (3.x, 5.x, etc.) and varying degrees of bugginess. There's also an up-to-date Windows port of Xlife by David Kinder.

Xlife is still technically the only Life package that offers a GUI way to recursively define bigger patterns in terms of smaller ones. Unfortunately the learning curve is very steep -- the three mouse buttons function in arcane ways that haven't been seen before or since -- and the resulting #I/#B/#E pattern format is quite tricky to write a parser for, so to my knowledge no other Life software can read those files (though they could be manually translated into a Golly script.)

[methodood]

Thank you Dave,

I found the old lovely text here : http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~rlr/icpsr03/ ... fe-man.txt

Code: Select all

Xlife(6) Xlife(6)
NAME 
Xlife - Conway's Game of Life, for X 
SYNTAX 
xlife [-geometry string] [initial pattern file] 
DESCRIPTION 
... ...

In fact it is the same text as the wapedia.pl that you found, only the look changes.
Now what's interesting is the actual paradigm implied in that text - level of knowledge and use, methods like prisoner's dilemna, authors, file formats, exploration (it tells that with 1234/3, patterns “crystallize" ) ... All that may find room in a rather historical site or wiki.