John Conway: Game Over

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tofro
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John Conway: Game Over

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The day before yesterday, British Mathematican and inventor of the "Game of Life" cellular automaton, John onway, sadly passed away at the age of 82, apparently of Covid-19.

His "Game of Life" was one of my first programming attempts in ZX-81-Basic (long lost).

As a farewell tribute to him, find attached two zip files containing a new "Game of Life" program for the QL. This time I found the program deserved to be implemented in a contemporary language which continiually withers away from common knowledge: Pascal - Here, Prospero Pascal.

You can run the game by executing the attached binaries and BOOT file (note the PP runtimes module needs to be LRESPRed first) or examine the source code - There's a makefile included that shows how to set up and build PP programs on SMSQ/E machines.

The game features a small editor for the world, as well as a "random fill".

Tobias
life_src.zip
(3.6 KiB) Downloaded 98 times
life_exec.zip
(26.75 KiB) Downloaded 82 times
GOL.png


EDIT: life_exec_zip re-uploaded due to mess-up. If prl (the PP run times) crashes your SMSQ/E machine, try to EPROM_LOAD prl_rom instead.
EDIT2: Some more minor fixes
Last edited by tofro on Tue Apr 14, 2020 8:27 am, edited 5 times in total.


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

Post by pjw »

Nice, tofro! Although I havent been able to test it yet. There appears to be a problem with the zip file: There are two Life_exe files (of different sizes), so unzip tries to overwrite the first one. No problem to rename, but is this what you wanted?
The second issue is that LRESPRing prl on SMSQ/E silently crashes the system. Is this for Qdos only?


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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pjw wrote:N
The second issue is that LRESPRing prl on SMSQ/E silently crashes the system. Is this for Qdos only?
Sorry for that.
I have cleaned up and re-uploaded the exec package. Apparently, prl crashes SMSQ/E - The new package has "prl_rom" in there, try to EPROM_LOAD that on SMSQ/E, that works for me.

Tobias


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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Great! :)
Ive always enjoyed these kind of simulations, although Ive never found the wherewithal to explore them as much as Id like.. I wonder, is entropy/stasis the inevitable outcome (with these rules)? So far it seems so, within < 2000 generations.
A few minor bugs: The title doesnt display correctly on my system, and S)imulate is misspelt.
Thanks to you and John Conway!


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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pjw wrote:Great! :)
Ive always enjoyed these kind of simulations, although Ive never found the wherewithal to explore them as much as Id like.. I wonder, is entropy/stasis the inevitable outcome (with these rules)? So far it seems so, within < 2000 generations.
Not quite: Use the editor and try this simple thing:

Code: Select all

 #
  #
###
That poor bugger will wander endlessly across the torus. Conway initially set out a 50$ reward for people finding such "non-converging" patterns. Over the decades, people have found quite a lot of them - Wikipedia has a quite nice article on "Life", including more complicated interesting patterns.
pjw wrote: A few minor bugs: The title doesnt display correctly on my system, and S)imulate is misspelt.
Hi Per!

thanks for the feedback. Corrected the typo (that whole thing was cobbled together in an hour this afternoon...), but what's wrong with the title on your system exactly?


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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tofro wrote:but what's wrong with the title on your system exactly?
Im a bit short of time at the mo, hence my breathless comments..
Turns out it wasnt the title. To recreate the issue try:
Start the program. Press E to edit, then immediately ESC. Thereafter all input goes to the outline window.


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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pjw wrote:
tofro wrote:but what's wrong with the title on your system exactly?
Im a bit short of time at the mo, hence my breathless comments..
Turns out it wasnt the title. To recreate the issue try:
Start the program. Press E to edit, then immediately ESC. Thereafter all input goes to the outline window.
Ah, yes! That was a leftover from some debug code. Fixed.

Thanks,
Tobias


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

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For those who dont yet feel over-saturated by everything Covid, I give you Qovid_bas. While not related to John Conway in any way, its still somewhat in the same ballpark as his Game of Life, so I put it here:
Qovid.zip
Qovid_bas
(5.45 KiB) Downloaded 93 times
I might have been able to do better with this "Covid Simulator", but I really didnt want to spend much time with it. Its primitive and unscientific, but I just felt an urge to offload this little idea from by brain, where its been rattling around for some time.

It should work with SMSQ/E and Minerva+TK2 on a GoldCard or better.


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

Post by swensont »

Tofro,

Nice job on the Pascal, esp. in just an hour. I'm very rusty with my Pascal. I like how you did the key input since the screen is SCR and not CON.

Tim


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Re: John Conway: Game Over

Post by tcat »

Hi,

Nice prog in commemoration of Conway.

Over the summer I did some reading on `Surreal Numbers' (only half understood), a new maths apparently also founded by Conway. The theory further leads to `Strategy Games', with interesting property, that for some games a winning strategy exists in the domain of surreal numbers.

Prospero Pascal, just curious how it compares to C1 Pascal, the one I have. C1 can run on plain QL, but have not tried yet, just read the manual.

Tomas


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