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Text File | 1994-06-16 | 13.8 KB | 283 lines

The "Game" of Life Copyright 1994 Castle Oaks Computer Services Post Office Box 36082 Indianapolis, IN 46236-0082 The "Game" of Life is a computer simulation of a universe where the exist- ence or non-existence of "life" follows certain prescribed rules. It was developed by Prof. John H. Conway at the University of Cambridge, and it was first written up by Martin Gardner in his October 1970 "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. Although this simulation does not depict any real life situation, it is still interesting to see how over- or under-population affects succeeding generations according to the rules for this environment. This implementation is a freeware program. It is copyrighted by Castle Oaks. You may distribute it freely. However, if you do, you must include this documentation file in its entirety. The purposes of this program are to introduce you to the "Game" of Life, to entertain you, and to advertise other Castle Oaks products. The following lists several Castle Oaks pro- ducts: WORDFIND - a system to help solve word puzzles. It consists of a vocabulary of over 100,000 words and a program to search that vocabulary for words that match a template that the user specifies. Suppose that you have the clue "rid- dles" and you know the second, fourth, and seventh letters are 'N', 'G', and 'S' respectively. You then enter the template, ?N?G??S, and the pro- gram returns these words that fit the template. ENIGMAS KNIGHTS ONAGERS Wordfind includes a special feature that is useful in solving cryptograms. The wild cards '-', '+', and '=' are reserved to indicate duplicate but un- known letters. Thus, the template, -+=+=B-???+, means to find all words where the 1st and 7th letters are the same, the 2nd, 4th, and 11th letters are the same, the 3rd and 5th letters are the same, and the 6th letter is a 'B'. WORDFIND will return "REMEMBRANCE" which is the only word that fits that template. Utilities are provided for modifying the vocabulary or for creating addi- tional vocabularies. Also, three auxiliary vocabularies are available at a cost of $15.00 per set. Set A has over 174,000 unusual words and words of variant spellings. Set B has over 135,000 entries which consists of expres- sions, all words in the old and new testaments, armament terms, and places names. They are divided into seven subsets. Set C has over 167,000 entries in subsets of Latin, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Jewish, and Literary terms. WORDFIND contains a feature called UNAGRAM which unscrambles anagrams. Registration fee for WORDFIND is $15.00. CROSSWORDS PUZZLE SOLVER - This is a credit card size device that provides some of the same features as WORDFIND. It is handy to carry with you when you do not have access to your computer. This is a product of Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc. The suggested retail price is $49.95. You may order it from Castle Oaks for $40.00 plus $5.00 shipping and handling. CLUEFIND - Similar to WORDFIND but the user builds his own vocabularies with clues included with the words. Cost is $10.00. TEXTFIND - This program allows you to provide a template with known characters (even non-alphabetic ones) and wild cards for unknown characters. Then using this template, you may search any file (even executable ones) for character strings that match the given template. TEXTFIND registration is $10.00. HINTHUNT(TM) - a program to generate word search puzzles. Great for teachers. Includes options for simpler puzzles and the capability for the word list and puzzle words to be different. Particularly useful for foreign language vocabulary drills. Cost of HINTHUNT(TM) is $15.00. TRAC/TRAP - a tutorial on the machine and assembly languages of a pseudo computer. This provides an introduction to these concepts. The package includes the pseudo computer simulator and assembly programs; lessons in their use; example TRAC and TRAP programs; and exercises with answers. Registration fee for TRAC/TRAP is $10.00. TO - FROM Utilities - programs to convert files of 8-bit characters to files of 7-bit characters and vice versa. If you ever need to upload a file to a host computer that cannot accept 8-bit characters (for example, MCI Mail), this system will allow you to do so. Also, some communication packages will only allow ASCII characters (7-bit characters) to be transmitted. Perhaps you have a spreadsheet or a database that you wish to upload to a host for repository and for later downloading to your own or other computers. You can use these utilities and the only penalty will be a slight increase in file size (approximately 33%). Registration fee for the TO - FROM Utilities is $10.00. GAME PACKAGE - TOWERS - This is a game and more. It is the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. In this puzzle you have 3 towers; on one tower are disks of different sizes. The object of this puzzle is to move all the disks, one at a time, to another tower such that you never place a larger disk on top of a smaller disk. With this package you can try to solve the puzzle; you may watch the program give the minimum move solution; and the package provides a selection of 5 screen savers. CARD MATCH - A concentration type game. It uses a standard deck of playing cards. These are to be matched in pairs. Three levels of play are provided and you may play alone or against an opponent. Although there are many games like this available, this one does not require an advanced graphics card. It will run on CGA. HURKLE - A game to find the "Hurkle" in a 15 x 15 grid. The game package is freeware. It may be obtained for a shipping and han- dling fee of $5.00. You may obtain the latest copy of 'The "Game" of Life' by sending a ship- ping and handling fee of $5.00 to Castle Oaks. OTHER ARTICLES - There have been several articles written about the "Game" of Life. Two articles were published in the December 1978 issue of Byte magazine and another one in the January 1979 issue of Byte magazine. The latter is only of historical interest. That article explores methods of writing a program to minimize the amount of memory required. In those days, personal computers only had a few K of memory. The other two article in Byte give a very good description of the simula- tion and they analyze and name various starting patterns and what results from those starting patterns. Included in this package are 14 starting patterns that were described in those articles. Other patterns also were described but I will leave it up to you to look up those patterns and/or create patterns of your own. Later, I will describe the patterns included. INTRODUCTION - In most implementations, it is assumed that the environment of the simula- tion is a two-dimensional plane that is infinite. This, of course, is not practical. Due to computer limitations, there are edges to the plane. In order to avoid that, this implementation uses the surface of a torus as the environment. In this way, the environment is finite, but unbounded. Fur- thermore, so that this program can be run on a minimal machine, CGA charac- ter graphics are used. On the screen, you will see a window that is 21 lines tall and 38 columns wide. You must visualize the environment as having the top of the window joined to the bottom of the window; and the right edge of the window joined to the left edge of the window. In some simulations, you will see groups of occupied cells leave one edge of the screen and re-appear at another edge of the screen. Although the window is not very large, it is usally large enough for most purposes. RULES - 1. If a cell (occupied or not) has exactly 3 neighboring cells occupied, then the given cell will be occupied in the next generation. 2. If a cell is occupied and has exactly 2 neighboring cells occupied, it will remain occupied in the next generation. 3. If neither (1) nor (2) apply, the cell will not be occupied in the next generation. PATTERNS - The "Game" of Life has been analyzed by various researchers and they have published their finding of what happens with some starting patterns. In the Byte article written by David J. Buckingham, he has described 5 classes of objects. Class I is still lifes. These are objects that do not change unless dis- turbed by other objects. Class II is oscillators. These are objects that after a number of genera- tions return to their starting pattern. They may be rotated or inverted at the end of a cycle. Class III is spaceships. These objects move across the environment. Class IV is uniform propigators. They are objects that move and may produce other objects. Class V is random. It is anything that does not fit one of the above class- es. SUPPLIED PATTERNS - I have not includes any still life objects by themselves since I think you will not find them very interesting. However, you are bound to stumble on to some of these yourself. A block and a beehive are both still lifes. The file BLCKBEEH illustrates how a block can destroy a beehive. The files 3EATER and 6EATER illustrate other still lifes that "eat" other objects. The files OSCPER5, PULSAR, TUMBLER, and PENTADEC are oscillators of various periods. A subclass of the oscillators are shuttles. BSCSHUTT and TWINBEES show objects that shuttle back and forth while eaters cleanup debris. Spaceships are depicted using the files: 3GLIDERS, SPACSHIP, and GLIDEGUN. These are objects that keep moving. GLIDEGUN ejects a projectile. The file SCHICK is of class IV. It is called a puffer train. Two spaceships appear to be pulling another object. Another is SNWFLKS. A snowflake (3 in this file) will generate a honey farm which is a group of 4 beehives. INSTRUCTIONS - When you run the program, some instructions will appear in a series of screens to guide you through the process. The opening screen gives a brief description of the rules and the environment. The next screen asks you if you want to load a pattern from a file. If you respond "yes", you will be asked for the name of the file to be loaded. If the file is not in the currently logged directory, you must include the path to that file. If the file cannot be found, the program will pause until you press a key. It will then continue without loading a file. Next, the program determines if you have a mouse. If you do not have a mouse, you are advised of that and when you press any key, the program will continue and you must position the cursor using the cursor keys. If you have a mouse, you are given the option of using the keyboard or the mouse. If you load a pattern from a file and do not intend to modify it, this question can be answered either way. After selecting either keyboard or mouse, a grid of cells will be displayed and if you have loaded from a file, some of the cells will be occupied. At this point, you can insert occupants into empty cells and erase occupants, even if you loaded from a file. The method of doing this depends on which option you chose. The upper border will display "Generation is 0". If you chose the keyboard, you use the cursor keys to move the cursor to any cell you desire. Pressing any key (except ESC) will enter a rectangle in the selected cell. Repeat this procedure for all the cells you want occupied. You can erase a rectangle by positioning the cursor on it and pressing any key (except ESC). When you are done loading all the cells you want occupied, press ESC to terminate entry mode. If you chose the mouse, use the mouse to move the mouse cursor to any cell you desire. Clicking the left mouse button will enter a rectangle in the selected cell. Repeat this procedure for all the cells you want occupied. You can erase a rectangle by positioning the cursor on it and clicking the left mouse button. When you are done loading all the cells that you want occupied, click the right mouse button to terminate entry mode. After terminating the entry mode, you will be asked if you want to save the starting pattern to a file. If you respond "yes", you will be prompted for a file name. Include a path, if necessary. After responding "no" or giving a file name, the screen will clear and the next generation will be dis- played. (Note: If you wish to create or modify a starting pattern file, you can do so with a text editor. Such files consist of 21 lines of 38 charac- ters. Each line is terminated with a carriage return and line feed. Unoccu- pied cells are denoted with a period. Occupied cells can contain any other character. Although such editing is possible, it is unnecessary since editing can be done within the program and the result saved.) Pressing any key, except ESC or Q, will advance the display to the next generation. The generation count in the top border will increment. If you want the display to change rapidly, you can hold a key down and the display will advance generation after generation. If your machine is too slow to process each generation at the typeamatic speed, you will overflow the keyboard buffer and the computer will beep at you. Just release the key until the computer catches up. When you have seen as many generations as you want to see, or if the dis- play stabilizes, you can terminate by pressing either ESC or Q. The screen will clear and you will be asked if you want to exit the program. If you respond by pressing E, the program will terminate. If you press anything else, the program will restart at the opening screen.