Describe Life

Life is a mathematical simulation game described by John Conway in Scientific American in Oct. 1970.

Keywords: Life, cellular automata, Newt, NewtonScript, mathematical simulation, Conway

Life Rules

Several rules are used to create a next generation from a cell's 8 neighbors:

0|0|0
0|?|0
0|0|0

Survival: a cell with 2 or 3 neighbors survives
Death: a cell with 1 or less, or 4 or more neighbors, "dies"
Birth: an empty cell with exactly 3 neighbors will be "born"

Use Life

Tap i:Help to view this document as an embedded help book

Grid: number of cells (depends on screen size/orientation)
Method: two drawing methods("Arr" or "Bit") x 3 generation methods ("default", "Inline", "Native")
Pattern: fill pattern for tap
Gen: turn on/off counter, timing
Clear: clear all cells, reset Gen. counter

Use Life (cont.)

Next: evolve a single generation
Repeat: evolve until all cells are empty or you tap Stop or Clear

Gestures:

tap: add a pattern, or toggle a cell
line: fill an area
scrub: erase an area

Sample Patterns

...to try (some in pattern picker):

blinker: flips

OOO

glider: down&left 1 in 4 steps

 0
O
OOO

block: stable

OO
OO

beehive: stable

 OO
O  O
 OO

5 long: turns into "traffic lights" (4 blinkers) in 9 steps

OOOOO

More Patterns

7 long: "honey farm" (4 beehives)

OOOOOOO

9 long: double traffic lights

OOOOOOOOO

If you have Newt's Cape installed, and you have added a helper app for .lif files (via the helplifi.htm installer application, you can download (small) patterns directly into the Life application.

Life Versions

The article "Life with NewtonScript" by David Betz in Byte, March 1994, pp. 191-194 provides some introduction/background -- and a challenge to develop more efficient versions.

Life created with NewtDevEnv; it's 1.x/2.x compatible. Help book created from this HTML document by Newt's Cape.

Version 1.5 (26 Mar 1998)

Distribute Life

The "game of Life" is freeware, and may be distributed freely as long as all of the files are included and unmodified. You are free to make modifications to the source for your own use.

Modify Life

If you would like to construct and modify Life directly on your Newton, obtain the latest shareware versions of

NewtDevEnv (aka "Newt"): an environment for developing applications and saving as packages directly on your Newton
Sloup: a text/data transfer utility

See implementation information in life.txt