Game of Life Links

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
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Nathaniel
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Game of Life Links

Post by Nathaniel » March 5th, 2009, 3:25 pm

Rather than having an increasingly out-of-date list of links that only I (and a few moderators) can update here, the list of Life links is now maintained on this LifeWiki page.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.
Attachments
wls-0.71.zip
WinLifeSearch 0.71 by Jason Summers
(205.15 KiB) Downloaded 1090 times
ofind.zip
ofind v0.9 by David Eppstein
(13.95 KiB) Downloaded 2780 times
lifesrc_v38.zip
v3.8 by David Bell
(40.99 KiB) Downloaded 2755 times
gsearch.zip
gsearch by David Eppstein
(8.57 KiB) Downloaded 2814 times
gfind_v48.zip
gfind v4.8 by David Eppstein
(19.42 KiB) Downloaded 2849 times
randomagar_v11.zip
Random Agar v1.1 by Gabriel Nivasch
(121 KiB) Downloaded 2699 times
catalyst_v10.zip
Catalyst v1.0 by Gabriel Nivasch
(15.11 KiB) Downloaded 2726 times
Last edited by dvgrn on April 30th, 2018, 1:40 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Lewis
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Lewis » March 18th, 2009, 5:11 pm

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

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Nathaniel
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Nathaniel » March 18th, 2009, 6:09 pm

Thanks, those have been added.

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by dvgrn » May 30th, 2009, 7:33 am

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...

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Nathaniel » May 30th, 2009, 2:19 pm

The list is now updated.

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Macbi
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Macbi » June 2nd, 2009, 12:38 pm

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".

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PM 2Ring
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by PM 2Ring » June 5th, 2009, 1:30 pm

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.

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Lewis » June 6th, 2009, 1:48 pm

I've found a new website with pattern collections for a few different rules:

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

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Awesomeness » June 12th, 2009, 7:32 pm

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++.

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Nathaniel » June 15th, 2009, 4:57 pm

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).

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Macbi » June 19th, 2009, 1:15 pm

Are there any descriptions anywhere of the quicklife algorithm? What optimisations does it use?

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by PM 2Ring » June 19th, 2009, 1:59 pm

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

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Andrew » June 20th, 2009, 2:39 am

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.
Use Glu to explore CA rules on non-periodic tilings: DominoLife and HatLife

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Macbi
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Macbi » June 20th, 2009, 9:51 am

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!

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Sokwe » July 9th, 2009, 3:27 pm

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.
-Matthias Merzenich

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Lewis
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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Lewis » August 1st, 2009, 1:36 pm

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

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by tedge » November 18th, 2009, 4:39 am

Crepuscular Life - Full resolution screensaver for Mac OS X:
http://twilightedge.com/mac/crepuscularlife/

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Lewis » February 7th, 2010, 1:23 pm

How do you use the programs which are .c files (eg. ofind.c)?

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Axaj » February 7th, 2010, 3:33 pm

Lewis wrote:How do you use the programs which are .c files (eg. ofind.c)?
You have to compile them yourself.
Image

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Lewis » February 8th, 2010, 5:21 pm

How do you compile them, and is any software required to compile?

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by calcyman » February 8th, 2010, 5:42 pm

You compile them with a dedicated C/C++ compiler, like Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition (downloadable for free).
What do you do with ill crystallographers? Take them to the mono-clinic!

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by Extrementhusiast » November 15th, 2010, 1:10 am

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
I Like My Heisenburps! (and others)

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by knightlife » January 15th, 2011, 4:00 pm

Interesting, but the algorithm is not revealed:

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

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by MikeP » January 17th, 2011, 8:47 am

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.

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Re: Game of Life Links

Post by George Maydwell » May 6th, 2011, 8:20 pm

My attempt at making a hexagonal Yin-Yang fire rule is here:

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

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