Stephen Silver's Life Page

This page concerns John Conway's Game of Life. In the unlikely event that you've never heard of Life you should read this article by Paul Callahan.

What Life stuff is available on this site?

Life Lexicon Hundreds of Life terms defined.
Stable Glider Reflectors Win $100.
Dense stable patterns Densest possible stable n by n patterns.

You can also download my collection of small spaceships (43K, updated 2004 Jan 12) or my collection of non-glider guns (71K, updated 2001 Jun 6). I hope to add further things to this site in the future. But the Lexicon should keep you going for a while - it's over 250K.

Links to other Life pages

This is just a very small selection of Life pages. Links to a number of others can be found on Jason Summers' links page.

Paul Callahan's Lots of articles and mail digests.
Mark Niemiec's Thousands of glider syntheses.
David Bell's Includes his spaceship articles.

Life Programs

Numerous programs have been written to run Life patterns. Here are a few of the better ones.

Johan Bontes' Life32 Very fast Win32 program with lots of nice features. (freeware)
Jon Bennett's Xlife Popular program for X-windows. (freeware)
Alan Hensel's LIFE 1.06 Very fast DOS program. (shareware)
Andrew Trevorrow's LifeLab For Macs. Fast with lots of features. (shareware)
Mirek Wójtowicz' Cellebration For Win32. Slow, but some nice features. (freeware)

Collections of Life patterns

A number of large collections of Life patterns are available on the Internet. Here are those I know about:

Alan Hensel's pattern collection A good general collection. [205K]
David Bell's pattern collection Another good general collection. [312K]
David Bell's c/3 collection Lots of c/3 spaceships and puffers. [101K]
Dieter Leithner and Peter Rott's gun collection Unofficial updated version maintained by Jason Summers
Jason Summers' pattern collections Rakes, slide guns and much more.
Dean Hickerson's Life pages Includes his famous oscillator "stamp collection".

These pattern collections use various different file formats. Life32 and Cellebration can read all of them, but most other Life programs can only read some of them. Dieter and Peter's collection in particular is in an unusual format (ProLife). I've written a small ProLife to rle converter (12K zip file containing C source and DOS executable). An rle to text converter is available from Mark Niemiec's site.

Miscellaneous Life Information

Life Search Programs David Eppstein's list of search tools.
Game of Life Status Page Jason Summers' list of what is known and what is not.

To Life Lexicon Home Page
This page is maintained by Stephen Silver
(e-mail: life@argentum.freeserve.co.uk)
Last updated: 2005 May 6
Original URL: http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/life.htm