22 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
22 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
Apparently first published in Martin Gardner's column in Scientific
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American magazine in the early 1970's, John Horton Conway's "Game of
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Life" launched great interest in the nascent field of cellular automata.
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The model (for it's not really a "game") manifests surprisingly complex
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behavior with only a few simple rules. Many of the technical papers,
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articles, and books inspired by the simulation are only now finding
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their way onto the World Wide Web.
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Many of the folks who were captivated by the original article would
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have done their explorations with pencil and paper. Now with "xlife",
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whether you hope to gain profound insight into the nature of life,
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the universe, and everything, or whether you just enjoy watching the
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"puffer trains" crash into each other, you can explore the simulation
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easily, on your workstation. The program supports a nearly infinite
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playfield, and allows you to zoom in and zoom out, speed up and slow
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down, so you can see all the action. Moreover, it can save and load
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patterns, and the package even includes a couple of programs to convert
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between popular formats.
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A sample of significant and interesting starting patterns is included,
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and a few minutes spent with a search engine will likely turn up lots
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and lots more.
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