NAME

life − John Conway’s game of life

SYNOPSIS

life

DESCRIPTION

Life is a program that plays John Conway’s game of life.  It only runs under suntools(1).

When invoked, life will display a window with a small control panel at the top, and a large drawing area at the bottom.  You can create pieces in the drawing area with the left button, and erase them with the middle button.  When you select run in the control panel, the pieces will begin to evolve, and the drawing region will update itself at a speed controlled by the slider labeled with fast and slow.  Life keeps track of all the pieces even if they are not visible.  The scroll bars surrounding the drawing region can be used to see pieces that have moved out of view.  There are some standard patterns that can be drawn by popping up a menu in the drawing subwindow. 

The meaning of the items in the first row of the control panel (from left to right) are as follows.  If you click on the picture which looks like a tic-tac-toe board, a grid will appear in the drawing region.  If you click on mode, the mode will change from run mode (where the pieces update continuously) to step mode (where an update is only done when you click on the step label).  The button marked clear will clear the drawing region and the one marked quit causes the tool to exit.  To the right of the quit button is a counter that records the generation number.  The second row contains two sliders.  The first controls the update speed when in run mode, the second controls the size of the pieces. 

Sun Release 3.0β  —  Last change: 29 April 1985