Bug#452026: RFP: golly -- Game of Life simulator using hashlife algorithm
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : golly
Version : 1.3
Upstream Author : Tomas Rokicki <rokicki@gmail.com>
Andrew Trevorrow <andrew@trevorrow.com>
* URL : http://golly.sourceforge.net/
* License : GPL version 2 or later
Programming Lang: C++, with Python scripting support
Description : Game of Life simulator using hashlife algorithm
Golly simulates Conway's Game of Life with an arbitrarily large grid
of cells. It can optionally use a hashlife algorithm, which allows
it to rapidly compute generations for huge patterns, and to compute
many generations into the future at a time.
.
Golly provides a graphical interface for viewing and editing cellular
automata. It supports copy and paste, zoom, auto-fit, multiple
layers, and viewing different areas of a pattern simultaneously in
different areas of a window.
.
Golly can load patterns from RLE, Life 1.05/1.06, dblife, and
macrocell file formats; it can also interpret images as Life
patterns. Golly provides integrated help, including a copy of the
Life Lexicon.
.
Golly also supports other rules for 2D cellular automata with an
8-cell neighborhood, and supports 1D cellular automata.
(end of description)
Some notes:
* Golly has some serious portability issues: in particular, it
generates many compiler errors if sizeof(node *) != sizeof(int).
Much of this seems to occur in the hash table code when hashing
pointer values, so in theory it might not cause a problem if made to
go away via appropriate casting.
* Golly uses wxWidgets, and supports building for either X11 or GTK+;
however, the authors specifically recommend against the X11 version,
so I'd suggest only packaging the GTK+ version.
* Golly runs extremely fast, and the hashlife algorithm makes many
complex patterns easy to simulate. On my system, I could easily
simulate a 3x3 grid of Unit Life cells running a blinker, with one
Unit Life generation per step, in real-time. I could also take any
of the patterns from Golly's database and run it to 1e10 generations
with no problems, even those with asymptotically quadratic growth.
* The interface beats xlife hands down.
- Josh Triplett
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