Life Applet

Copyright © 2000 by Telsa Gwynne and Eric Baudais

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.

To add this applet to a Panel, right-click on the Panel and choose Panel->Add to panel->Applet->Amusements->Game of Life. or you can issue this command at a command prompt: life_applet --activate-goad-server=life_applet &

Figure 1. Life Applet

Usage

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

Right-clicking on the applet brings up a menu containing the following items:

  • Randomize — randomizes the game. This will stop it from getting boring and repeating the same patterns.

  • Help — displays this document.

  • About… — shows basic information about the Game of Life Applet, inluding the applet's version and the author's name.

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%.

Known Bugs and Limitations

None known.

Authors

The Life Applet was written by George Lebl (). Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. (Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line. If you are using GNOME 1.1 or later, you can also use Bug Report Tool (bug-buddy), available in the Utilities submenu of Main Menu, for submitting bug reports.

This manual was written by Telsa Gwynne () and Eric Baudais (). Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to the GNOME Documentation Project by sending an email to . You can also submit comments online by using the GNOME Documentation Status Table.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is included as an appendix to the GNOME Users Guide. You may also obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to

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