Rocklife

A port of Conway's Game of Life to rockbox

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life:

Rules

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness.

2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.

3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation.

4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.

The initial pattern constitutes the first generation of the system. The second generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the first generation -- births and deaths happen simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. (In other words, each generation is based entirely on the one before.) The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

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Rocklife can now open starting configurations saved in the .cells format. See: http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/lexicon/

-- JustinHannigan - 31 Mar 2009

Descriptions of several commonly used file formats can be found here.

Some nice collections of starting configurations can be found at the following locations:

• David Bell's DBLife collection: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games/amusements/life/dblifelib-2.tgz [link broken]
• Alan Hensel's collection in Life 1.05 format: http://www.mindspring.com/~alanh/lifep.zip
• Mark Niemec's site with many patterns saved in RLE format: http://codercontest.com/mniemiec/lifepage.htm

I have submitted a patch that adds support for both varieties of .l files as well as .lif/.life and .rle files. I have tested that patterns from the first two work well with the patch. For some reason, the files I have saved from Mark Niemec's site don't seem to produce the desired configuration, but as far as I can tell this is a problem with the files themselves, not with how they are handled. A sample glider saved in RLE format from the psoup.math.wisc.edu site does open properly and generate the expected configuration. -- JustinHannigan - 2010-08-30

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Todo	Status	Description
Colours	0%	nicer colours for pixels with respect to age
Editor	0%	editor for start patterns
Speed-ups	0%	probably tons of speed-up opportunities

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CategoryPlugin: Rocklife [Player, Recorder, Ondio, H100, H300, H10, iPod 1G2G, iPod 4G, iPod Color, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Video, iAudio M5, iAudio X5, Gigabeat, Sansa e200, Sansa c200, Sansa Fuze, MR-100]