Understanding Rule Notation in QuickLife

[heaversm]

Hi - I'm trying to understand the lightspeed bubble pattern in Golly (and familiarize myself with GOL in general), and it uses this rule:

B3/S23:T600,136

I understand the b and s, but what is the T:600,136?

Can someone explain this, or even better, where to find a thorough explanation of quicklife rule syntax?

[Freywa]

One of Golly's most recent developments was the addition of bounded grids, where a certain region is defined and cells at the edges of that grid are handled differently. This allows the program to support old file formats which had limited memory.

Here T600,136 means a Toroidal grid of 600 by 136 cells; patterns which would hit the grid's edges reappear on the opposite side (likewise for corner). There are a few other cell-lattice models available which I will not explain here, for your question was already answered.

[heaversm]

Thank you! Should have realized that it was the same as the rule's X / Y values.

[wildmyron]

The documentation of the notation for bounded grids can be found in Golly under Help -> Bounded Grids. It applies not only to Quicklife, but all the 2D algorithms which Golly supports.

Perhaps it would help to have a link to bounded grids in the help page for the rules which Golly supports - I recently found myself hunting for the bounded grids page when I was unsure of a particular detail.

[Andrew]

... I recently found myself hunting for the bounded grids page when I was unsure of a particular detail.

It would be nice to have some sort of search facility in Golly's help window but the wxHTML class doesn't seem to provide an API for that. Actually, it would be possible to write a Python script that searched Golly's .html files for a given string and then presented Google-like results in the help window, but you'd still have the problem of hunting for the string in each matching page (some of which might have lots of text).

Speaking of Google, you can search Golly's online help for a word or phrase by entering a search string like this:

Code: Select all

site:golly.sourceforge.net/Help bounded grid

[calcyman]

If you have xp6_ccb7w66z066, then you can run the command-line utility grep to display all lines of Golly's Help files containing a substring matching your favourite regular expression. In this case, the regular expression:

Code: Select all

:T[0-9]+,[0-9]+

should suffice.

[shouldsee]

One of Golly's most recent developments was the addition of bounded grids, where a certain region is defined and cells at the edges of that grid are handled differently. This allows the program to support old file formats which had limited memory.

Here T600,136 means a Toroidal grid of 600 by 136 cells; patterns which would hit the grid's edges reappear on the opposite side (likewise for corner). There are a few other cell-lattice models available which I will not explain here, for your question was already answered.

Hi there, it's exciting to hear that golly can handle cells differently. I am wondering whether it would be possible to have two connected bounded grids implemented with different rules?