So that’s where you’ve disappeared to recently! There, I made some hopefully vaguely helpful contributions. Now finish up and then sneakily edit a link to your version into the wikipedia article to generate some actual attention (plus, your version is actually nice and pretty and stuff).

Also, on a random note, I’ve actually been to a few Conway lectures, some 5.5 years ago now, albeit more about Knot theory and some games and some general things about dealing with infinity, and not about Life. He’s fun to listen to, and quite cool, anyway.

Yeah, silly me always getting sidetracked with new projects :$

I have a few things I wanna fix up with the tool itself and a few more pages I wanna fix up/add to the LifeWiki before I advertise it around too much, but it’s coming along pretty nicely. And thanks for signing up at the wiki, I got way too excited when I saw that someone else finally added a page 😉

It seems quite nice and very useful but It’s not working with my browser, all the menus and controls except for the slider on the left hand side are visible for just enough of a second to catch the flash of them existing before being over written with the field. I was really hoping to get to look at long term patterns since this has the ability to be the largest grid I could find on the internet.

I forgot to say that my browser is safari which strikes me as rather ironic in some way.

@anders

Strange, I use Chrome which also uses Webkit, so I assumed it would behave the same as Safari. Until I get this fixed, you could try using it in Firefox, since that for sure works. Alternatively, Alan Hensel’s applet at http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/ can be scaled to be a large as you want, though I’m not sure if you can load in external pattern files or not.

Thanks for letting me know.

Upon looking into this deeper, it looks like there genuinely isn’t a solution to the problem for Safari (Safari just doesn’t play nicely with drawing stuff over top of Java applets — see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1936634&tstart=135)

Anyways, I’ve added a “compatability mode” to the site that at least makes the webpage usable for Safari users. If you access the website via Safari, the controls now appear at the top-right corner of the page rather than the bottom-right. Let me know how that works for you.

thank you

well, I tried fire fox and it has the exact same problem for me, so I don’t know where the problem is coming from.

Hi I’m making a Game of life implementation for C++ at my University. And I wish to add your online database to my app. Is this possible ? Ok I know that if I ask Your database will let me see any pattern I know. But the problem is that I need to discover names of patterns first. Is this possible with your database.

(Simple string with names will be enough).
And can you tell me how often new patterns are added to database ? (To avoid querying database every start looking for new ones).

@przemo_li – New patterns aren’t added terribly frequently (basically just as they are discovered at this point). Certainly no more than one or two are added a week nowadays.

As for the accessing the pattern database itself, you could have your program access the following HTML file, which auto-updates itself on my server:

http://www.conwaylife.com/gollycomplete.html

Note though that the links on that page are not normal HTML links (for example, the link for the first file is “get:pattern.asp?p=101.rle”), so you will have to alter the link a bit to access the actual RLE file on my server (for example, the correct link would be “http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=101.rle”).

Alternatively, if you just want to download the entire pattern collection to have an offline version of it, here is a reasonably up-to-date .zip file of it:

http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/download/file.php?id=32

All the best!

Thank You. I think downloading .zip and checking for new not listed in zip file would be the best.

And I’ll add links to your wiki as your applet do.

Your project seems to be very nice and ambitious. I think your site will be the best Conway’s Game of Life site when you get your applet to work. As it is now, it makes my firefox browser to crash and it doesn’t work at all in Chrome.

I have started a similar project for similar reasons. At the time I started, I was looking at Google Web Toolkit (compiles Java code into JavaScript) and did some searched on Google for Game of Life and found that the top results where not so very impressing. I thought I could do something better with GWT with the additional benefit that no Java plug-in would be necessary.

The result can be found on:
http://www.conwaysgameoflife.net

I also plan to add a pattern archive and maybe possibility to save patterns. I would like to spend more time on it but to get that time is a problem for me. I will probably make it open source soon so other people can add futures to it.

BOO

I have not seen any new material in your LIFEWIKI in a good while. I found this link while seeing if any new LIFE website has arisen. Today I extirpated 6 websites from my favorites links ,two were app. abandoned by their managers and I was tired of waiting, two were schlubby cartoon sites, and two were unwanted BINGs. I schelduled their deletion today, having given their managers more than enough time to quit their games and revitalize their websites.

Hopefully I won’t have to delete YOU and Lifenews(Pentadecathlon.com – laptop just sits on its hands if I try to log on).

I have ~365 oscillators (I can’t get an exact count),~136 spaceships (again unable to get an exact count), 14 puffer trains, 5 guns, 1 factory, 3 Rakes, 6 stretchers *, 1 Space-Filler. I can’t manage the HUGE patterns that calculate prime numbers, etc. My highest oscillator is P256, but I have schematics for a P598 system (needs finer resolution graph paper).

I hope this is not a deadened website,that my comment won’t be just spit back with a ADDRESS NOT FOUND message.

I also have many,many ancestors to still-lifes AND to common patterns. Both long-term and not so long-term

* Stretchers include 2 Growing Spaceships, 1 wick-stretcher …