BeLife

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Description:

About BeLife:

BeLife is a BeOS/Zeta implementation of the 'Conway's game of Life' math model.

The Game of Life (or simply Life) is not a game in the conventional sense. There are no players, and no winning or losing. Once the "pieces" are placed in the starting position, the rules determine everything that happens later. Nevertheless, Life is full of surprises! In most cases, it is impossible to look at a starting position (or pattern) and see what will happen in the future. The only way to find out is to follow the rules of the game.

Rules of the Game of Life:
Life is played on a grid of square cells--like a chess board but extending infinitely in every direction. A cell can be live or dead. A live cell is shown by putting a marker on its square. A dead cell is shown by leaving the square empty. Each cell in the grid has a neighborhood consisting of the eight cells in every direction including diagonals.

To apply one step of the rules, we count the number of live neighbors for each cell. What happens next depends on this number.

* A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).

* A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).

* In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

Note:
The number of live neighbors is always based on the cells before the rule was applied. In other words, we must first find all of the cells that change before changing any of them. Sounds like a job for a computer!

Background:
Life was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970. He choose the rules carefully after trying many other possibilities, some of which caused the cells to die too fast and others which caused too many cells to be born. Life balances these tendencies, making it hard to tell whether a pattern will die out completely, form a stable population, or grow forever.

BeOS:
In BeOS I found two 'Life' applications, a screensaver called GLife and 'Life' an application which simulates the Game of Life math. Unfortunally 'Life' had a dead link, so I hunted down the sources and tried to inprove it a little. The result is 'BeLife'. Please note that that most important bits of code in this application come from the 'Life' application, by Jeremy and Matt.

BeLife offers the same functionality as 'Life', plus user defined colors, special patterns, random patterns and an option to kill all life.

Find out more about about Conway's Game of Life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

Variation description:

This is the Haiku and R5 version of BeLife. BeLife has the same functionality for Zeta, Haiku and R5.

Details about this version:

This is the first release.
bug-reports, suggestions and feature request are very welcome in the Talkback section.

Related Links:

GLife

Life

More about Game of Life

Submitted On:

11 Feb 2010

Submitted By:

Karl vom Dorff (karl)

File Size:

81.23 Kb

Downloads:

License:

Other Open Source License

File Version:

1.0

File Author:

0033

File HomePage:

Click to visit site

Rating:

Total Votes:1

Comments

0 # BeLife doesn't open — andrewzx1 2010-02-11 08:13

Archive file appears to be invalid.

0 # RE: BeLife doesn't open — karl 2010-02-11 09:02

I've testing decompressing this file with Windows and OSX's built-in decompressor; both extract it without any problems. Must be a bug in Haiku's Zip binary. I've unzipped it in Windows and re-zipped it in Haiku. It does work now.