Life Applet

Telsa Gwynne

This is version 1.0 of the Life Applet manual.

Table of Contents
The life applet

The life applet

The GNOME panel life is an applet which runs 'the game of life' according to Conway's rules in a small grid in your panel, with the organism and background colour constantly changing. It is part of the gnome-applets package. This section of the guide refers to life-1.1.2, which is distributed in gnome-applets-1.1.2.

To add the life applet to your panel, either click on mouse button 2 on an empty part of the panel and follow the sequence Applets->Amusements->Game of Life or you can issue this command at a command prompt: life_applet --activate-goad-server=life_applet &

The life applet was written by "The Man in the Box", whoever that is...

Please report bugs in the life applet to the GNOME bug tracking system. You can do this by following the guidelines on that site or by using bug-buddy from the command-line. For the package, put gnome-applets.

Usage

Once it is present, you don't need to do anything to the life applet. It will run happily on its own. The following options are available:

  1. Pressing mouse button 1 has no effect.

  2. Pressing mouse button 2 brings up some of the standard choices available for applets. There is no properties menu, but there is an About box and an option to randomise the game if it is getting boring.

  3. Holding down mouse button 3 allows you to move the life applet about in the same way you move anything on the panel.

Rules

The Game of Life as described by Conway in 1970 has the following rules:

  • Start with a grid (usually a plain square) of squares. Fill a proportion of them with cells, randomly placed. This is generation zero.

  • Any cell with two or three neighbours survives to the next generation.

  • On any square with no cell and three neighbours, a new cell is born. On any other square, no new cells are born.

  • Repeat generations.

The game will eventually end in one of a number of ways:

  • The death of all cells (theoretical, but uncommon in the life applet).

  • A fixed equilibrium with all remaining cells surviving but creating no new cells.

  • A dynamic equilibrium where the game cycles continually through a particular sequence of patterns.

For interest value, the current grid in the life applet is 78 by 78 and the proportion of squares filled with cells is 50%.