KittyTac wrote:I run Windows, and I am broke and cannot really buy a new PC to run Mac or Linux or whatever. I may make a separate program, though.
Golly has everything you need to do the kind of simulations you're describing -- you just can't do it natively with a single rule table.
I'd say it's not too likely that Golly will be updated to allow more than 256 states in the near future -- it's just too convenient and efficient to be able to store the state of each cell in a lowest-level hashtile as a single byte. At least, changing that would be more of a headache than I would want to tackle, given that Golly with that modification might not perform nearly as well -- RuleLoader would presumably run out of memory quicker.
Rules that need more than 256 states seem to be relatively few and far between, anyway... and if they're complicated enough, like a rule running nine independent Life universes simultaneously, then there are way too many rule lines needed in practice and Golly can't run the rule well anyway.
For the case you mention -- states that should only become active every N ticks -- just write two separate rule tables RuleA and RuleB, plus a Lua script that switches to RuleA and runs N-1 ticks, then switches to RuleB and runs 1 tick, and repeats that until you hit Escape.
You can add support in the script for higher step sizes or other standard Golly functionality, depending on what you need. See heisenburp.lua, which does some similar kinds of event handling to allow different speeds and reset options and so on, without leaving the script.
). So the 78 generation separation requirement is no problem! Ideally I'd like the seed still-life to be as small as possible (population-wise), but I suspect it will be large in any case.
