Notable Life Programs
Computers have been used to follow Life configurations from the earliest days. When John Conway was first investigating how various starting configurations developed, he tracked them by hand using a Go board with its black and white stones. This was tedious and prone to errors. The first-ever Life program was written by John Francis (an undergraduate student at Cambridge) on an IBM 360, and was used to automate this process and track the fate of the "R" pentomino for 1000 generations. The first interactive Life program was written in ALGOL 68 for the PDP-7 by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne. The results were published in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American and - regarding the use of the program - reports "Without its help, some discoveries about the game would have been difficult to make."
There are now thousands of Life programs online, so a full list will not be provided here. The following is a small selection of programs with some special claim to notability, such as popularity or unusual features. Most of these programs incorporate a graphical user interface for pattern editing and simulation, the capability for simulating multiple rules including Life, and a large library of interesting patterns in Life and other CA rules.
- Conway's Game of Life, by Alan Hensel. A pop-up Java web applet with fast simulation algorithms and a large library of interesting Life patterns.
- Golly. A cross-platform (Windows, Macintosh and Linux) open-source simulation system for Life and other cellular automata, by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki. It includes the hashlife algorithm for extremely fast generation, and Perl or Python scriptability for both editing and simulation.
- Life32. Freeware for Windows machines, it includes powerful and scriptable pattern editing features.
- Mirek's Cellebration. Free 1-D and 2-D cellular automata viewer, explorer and editor for Windows. Includes powerful facilities for simulating and viewing a wide variety of CA rules including Life, and a scriptable editor.
- Xlife. A cellular-automaton laboratory by Jon Bennett. The standard UNIX X11 Life simulation application for a long time, it has also been ported to Windows. Can handle cellular automaton rules with the same neighbourhood as Life, and up to eight possible states per cell.
Read more about this topic: Conway's Game Of Life
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