LIFEGAME command starts "Game of Life" invented by by John Conway
in 1970 and made popular by Martin Gardner in Scientific American.
The game is played in Survo on a rectangular finite board of cells.
By various specifications the original rules and the appearence of
the game may be modified.
Original rules: At any time some of the cells will be alive or dead.
The user determines the borders of the game board and living cells at
the beginning as follows (use /BOX for drawing border lines):
LIFEGAME / Activate this line!
+---------------------------+
| |
| *** |
| *** |
| *** |
| |
| |
+---------------------------+
Game of Life in Survo (continued)
Let's study a cell * surrounded by 8 others:
123
8*4
765
If cell * is alive and it is surrounded by 4 or more living cells,
it will die by `overcrowding'. Likewise if at most 1 of the neighbours
are alive, the cell dies by `exposure'. In other cases the cell stays
alive for the next generation.
If the cell is dead (empty), it will be born again if it has exactly
3 living neighbours.
The cells on the borders are assumed to be dead all the time.
The rules for birth and death are given by ON and OFF specifications.
Thus the original (default) setting is ON=3 OFF=0145678 .
Game of Life in Survo (continued)
Other specifications:
NMAX gives number of generations to be produced.
WAIT gives time between successive gemerations to be displayed.
LIFE gives a list of characters to be used for marking living
cells. Also shadow characters may be employed for painting
successive generations with different colors.
Example: LIFE=***
By studying the `screen saver' sucro /LIFEGAME still more specifications
may be detected.
More information is found (in Finnish) by activating
/ELOPELI
Help System (web edition)