Bug#196498: #196498 Breeder is sterile

[Peter De Wachter]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:28:00 +0000
Steve Cotton <steve0001 at s.cotton.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> Running that on all of xlife's files doesn't fix it, but does produce
> a pattern that's about half-way between the broken version and golly's
> version.  The result is not in itself interesting.  

FWIW, there's a "new" upstream release of xlife (5.3, 11 years old
now), which can load the breeder file correctly. There's some
preliminary packaging work in SVN. But both 5.0 and 5.3 seem to be
quite buggy. IMHO xlife should simply be removed, but Barry deFreese
seemed to want to keep it around.

> Having seen xlife and golly side-by-side, golly 1.4 (which is in
> unstable) has a far better UI but not as many rulesets as xlife.

Golly also has the fantastic hashlife algorithm. Try enabling the
Hashing & Superspeed options :)

> Golly 2.0 has recently been released (not in Debian yet), and from
> its changelog looks like it will completely obsolete xlife.

The ruleset support in xlife is not as good as it looks. For example,
it can't do the standard Wireworld rules (the shipped ruleset is a
variant).


-- 
Peter De Wachter