Conway's Game of Life

Being surprised that there’s no RISC OS version of Conway’s Game of Life (that is, I couldn’t find one), I wrote one myself.
It can be downloaded here.

The program comes with the source included, as well with a short manual in PDF format.

PS
The Game of Life shows the evolutions of cells – black squares on a white grid – according to 3 simple rules, invented by the English mathematician John Conway, 50 years ago. I think it’s still quite fascinating.

There was one in the Mesolithic era. I think it might have been on an Archimedes World cover disc. Lost to time as was much of the stuff from those days…

Thanks for the update, and yes, it’s a fascinating thing.

Sources seem to say Conway devised his Game of Life in 1970, but I think that’s really when Martin Gardner published a piece about it in Scientific American. I think I must’ve come across it somehow a little earlier, since I remember writing a Game of Life programme in Fortran that run on the University ICL 1905E. I got into trouble about it, because I got a rather large stack of printouts one morning after an overnight run.

I think that must have been before 1970 – possibly ‘69 but more likely ’68 – because by mid-1969 I was monopolizing the department’s PDP8 and had largely given up using the ICL.

There was one in the Mesolithic era. I think it might have been on an Archimedes World cover disc.

I just found an article in A&B Computing from January 1985, written by the priceless John Kortink. He created a version for the BBC micro, in pure 6502 assembly.

Interesting comparison: as his version is optimised for speed, calculating the next generation on a “very large grid of 80 × 60” only takes 1 second. In pure BASIC this would take 8 minutes, according to his own words. Time has progressed ever since…

I went up to Trinity College Cambridge in 1957 and met John Conway very early. He was manning a stand for the Trinity Mathematical Society at the annual show in the Guildhall. We became good friends. I cannot remember when he first talked of Life, but it could not have been long after 1957. My director of studies was Swinnerton Dyer who at that time was also director of the Computing Centre. John’s supervisor was Davenport, also a number theorist and colleague of S-D.

There was an excellent shareware implementation called MacroLife by Chris Taylor. I have a copy from 1995 which runs on the Risc PC but fails to run on the Iyonix. It came with lots of “guns”, “spaceships” and other impressive objects which you could load in, and a vast playing space with local, regional and global overview windows, allowing you to track down anything that was moving or developing.

There was an excellent shareware implementation called MacroLife by Chris Taylor.

This morning I got the brilliant idea to look for a version at the Play store. The first hit now runs on my cheap Oppo Reno. And how! Good heavens, what a wonderful piece of software that is! I felt proud of myself for exactly two days. That’ll teach me.

Even more humiliating was the article about Chris Taylor’s MacroLife. It seems that it did nearly everything that the incredible app on my Oppo does today, only 25 years earlier on a RISC OS 2 A3000! With a grid of 65536 × 65536!! I’m flabbergasted and short of exclamation marks. (I better get back to my piano again, but I wished I had a copy of this MacroLife and that it would run on my lovely 4té.)

I don’t actually remember how big the grid was on my Fortran program, nor how many hours of runtime on the ICL it took to churn out about 200 pages – Z-fold tractor feed stuff that lasted me for scrap paper for ages – I might even still have some, I’m not sure. With pale green lines on the printed side, but gloriously plain on the other.

It wasn’t long after that that they introduced a cap on undergraduate runtime and output – which resulted in howls of complaint as people’s programs were kicked off uncompleted, or printouts stopped halfway through the output. No howls from me though, I kept schtum…

but I wished I had a copy of this MacroLife and that it would run on my lovely 4té

There is/was a demo version of Macrolife on the APDL site in b394.zip. It is 26bit but does run with Aemulor on the Titanium.

There is/was a demo version of Macrolife on the APDL site in b394.zip. It is 26bit but does run with Aemulor on the Titanium.

It runs natively on VirtualAcorn as well. What can I say? I’m baffled. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I withdraw mine.

This new Game of Life is good too.

Just one little snag, I don’t have the Dingbats font on the Titanium, nor was it on any of the Pi’s. This from the Game of Life PDF :-

Requirements
This version of Game of Life denitely needs the font Dingbats to be pre-
sent, because the entire window is font-painted, rather than sprite-plotted.
As Dingbats is part of the default RISC OS distribution, this shouldnt be a
problem.

The OS5.26 User Guide is of the opinion that Selwyn, which is in the ROOL HD4 downloads, is the RISC OS equivalent of Dingbats so, with a little hacking, I used that instead. This seems to be working.

Dingbats was eventually found in a ROD Direct RPCEmu installation.

HTH.

The OS5.26 User Guide is of the opinion that Selwyn, which is in the ROOL HD4 downloads, is the RISC OS equivalent of Dingbats

Well, stone me! That’s true indeed. It’s Selwyn that is part of the RISC OS distribution, not Dingbats. I’ll change that in a future update, although I doubt if it will ever see the light, deeply impressed as I am by the existing and much, much better software.

deeply impressed as I am by the existing and much, much better software.

Hey, now. There’s nothing wrong with alternatives.

There’s nothing wrong with alternatives.

Especially ones that don’t need to run with 26-bit crutches.

All right, I found the courage to announce an update of my basic Game of Life
There’s a number of improvements, as well as a number of things to be done. Have fun.