Golly is a tool for the simulation of

cellular automata A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...

. It is free

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

written by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki; it can be scripted using Lua or Python. It includes a hashlife algorithm that can simulate the behavior of very large structured or repetitive patterns such as Paul Rendell's Life

universal Turing machine In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine capable of computing any computable sequence, as described by Alan Turing in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Co ...

, and that is fast enough to simulate some patterns for 2³² or more time units. It also includes a large library of predefined patterns in

Conway's Game of Life The Game of Life, also known as Conway's Game of Life or simply Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial ...

and other rules.

References

External links

* {{Conway's Game of Life Cellular automaton software Cross-platform free software Lua (programming language)-scriptable software Software that uses wxWidgets