Feb. 12th, 2006

mmcirvin: (Default)
I went looking for a good Conway Life implementation for modern Macs and found a Java applet.

This really makes me feel old: I remember when you had to push a PC to its absolute limit to get a fraction of this kind of performance, and William "Big Secrets" Poundstone wrote a book on cellular automata that described the life of the R-pentomino as beyond the capability of current PCs to handle (I don't think that was actually true even at the time).

The most interesting Mac cellular automata program was an old System 7 one whose name I forget that actually included a Pascal-like programming language for the cell rules, so you could do far more complex things than most CA programs will let you do. The language had a random number generator in it, so there could be a stochastic element. I remember coming up with models that exhibited things like domain walls and phase transitions.

By golly!

Feb. 12th, 2006 10:12 am
mmcirvin: (Default)
OK, never mind that Life applet (nice as it is): Golly is the serious stuff.

Especially the hashing and hyperspeed options. You may think you've seen highly optimized Life algorithms, but you haven't until you've seen your little computer run a gigantic spaceship rake at ten billion generations a second. It's got a very nice, distinctly Andrew Trevorrowesque UI too; it's nice to see him tackle a Mac OS X UI as comfortably as he used to do with Classic (there are Windows and Linux versions too, and source of course).

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