By golly!

[mmcirvin]

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).

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

With hashing, Golly is actually capable of running the Caterpillar (http://www.yucs.org/~gnivasch/life/article_cat/), allegedly the largest nontrivial, rationally constructed Life pattern in existence. The whole point of it was to make a "spaceship" pattern that crawls at the speed of a pi heptomino crawling along a row of traffic-light blinkers, something that had not been done before. The Caterpillar is basically a humongous mass of pi heptominoes, spaceships and gliders, with a total population of about twelve million lit cells, that lays down its own blinker tracks and picks them up again.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, cool... I used to be seriously into the Game of Life; perhaps a couple of objects in the standard "interesting objects" file are credited to me.

Now that computers are so much faster, I'm tempted to go back and fill in one of the missing oscillator periods (I think p17 or p19 is the smallest period not attested).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It appears to be p19 these days (http://entropymine.com/jason/life/status.html#oscper).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The application comes with a bunch of pre-made patterns, but if you're interested in the esoterica of Life, be sure to check out the Help feature too: there's an included version of Stephen Silver's Life Lexicon (http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm) in which all the ASCII-art patterns have been turned into links that can instantiate the patterns in the pattern window.

Also, here's a universal computer (http://www.igblan.free-online.co.uk/igblan/ca/).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The upright version of that universal computer falls apart partway down after it's been running a while. I don't know if it's a bug in the RLE configuration or a bug in Golly (I suspect the former).

The diagonal version you can download from the same page that runs on gliders instead of spaceships doesn't need any moving parts away from the actual execution streams, so it's much simpler.

[(Anonymous)]

> The upright version of that universal computer falls apart partway
> down after it's been running a while. I don't know if it's a bug in
> the RLE configuration or a bug in Golly (I suspect the former).

You'd be right. I'll fix it one day. :)

Cheers, Igblan