Game of Life applet

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...On the other hand, with these algorithms a lot of the trouble might be not spraying the grid to the screen, but converting from whatever nontrivial internal representation it's using. (Obviously Golly is not storing the whole grid as raw bits for something like the late-stage Metacatacryst; that would not be possible for any computer in existence.)

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Mac OS X's graphics APIs are powerful, but notoriously slow. There's a reason I put in an immense effort to make Xee use OpenGL instead, because the OS X functions just aren't cutting it.

OpenGL has a small bottleneck in actually uploading the texture data to the video RAM, but that is probably not too signficant here.