What is Winlife32?

Winlife32 is a comprehensive system for manipulating Conway's Game of Life and other similar cellular automata. It provides:

• powerful graphical editor and visualisation system
• high-performance grow and display
• reads and writes widely-used XLife file format
• rule editor allows any growth rules based on eight adjacent neighbors
• automatic end-of-game detection
• automatic pattern recognition with comprehensive pattern library support
• random broth generation

...and it's free!

Err... what is Conway's Game of Life?

A simple yet powerful set of rules for Cellular Automata, devised by the English mathematician John H. Conway in 1970. Each cell in an infinite matrix obeys a simple rule for deciding whether it will be "alive" or "dead" in the next generation. Specifically, if a cell is alive and exactly two or three of its eight neighbors are alive, it stays alive; otherwise it dies. If a cell is dead and exactly three of its neighbors are alive, it comes to life. With this simple rule comes a truly incredible variety of life forms: still lifes of all sizes, oscillators, objects which move, and even a simulation of a Turing Machine.

System Requirements

Winlife32 will run on anything that can run a 32-bit Windows system (95, 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7). The faster the CPU, the faster it will run, and the more memory you have, the bigger the games you can have. But the original development (16-bit) was done on a 486/33 with 8 Mbytes of memory.

How to Get Winlife32

1. Click here or on the button above to download the zip file containing Winlife32
2. Extract the file to whatever directory you want (c:\program files\winlife32 seems a good idea, but it's up to you)
3. Run the file winlife32.exe
4. The online help tells you everything you need to know, or see getting started
5. If you want to add Winlife32 to the Start menu, or put it on the desktop, that's up to you.

If you have an older or slower machine, you may be irritated by the time it takes to start Winlife32. You have two ways to speed things up:

• Go to the File options page (Game/Options/File) and unselect "Load system library at startup".
• Rename "syslib.lfl" to "big-syslib.lfl" and then "small-syslib.lfl" to "syslib.lfl". This is a smaller library which just contains the frequent small patterns. Even so, if you do a Census, you will find that the first time there may be a lengthy delay while the library is fully analysed. I'm afraid the only solution is to buy a faster machine, if you want to use the Census feature.

Suggestions, Comments, Bug Reports...

Send all of the above to feedback@winlife32.com. If you do find a bug, please supply as much information as possible, including (if you can) the pattern that you were running, exactly what you were doing at the time, and anything else that seems relevant.