Conway's Life activity

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hi, Ross,

> I think it would be neat to have a dedicated activity for it, with the  
> ability to save interesting patterns in the journal, and so forth.

  I'm not sure if a dedicated activity is neater or not (I know people
who would say "yes"), but it is surely possible with the Etoys version
to save interesting patterns in the Journal.  Different rules,
different ways to make the initial state different colors, more
variables, more states, etc., etc., can be all packaged in a Journal
entry.

  The logic to count the neighboring on-cells is end-user accessible,
and it is packaged as well so that the user can even change that.
(After all, I just wrote it while I was waiting for an appointment at
a clinic.  That means anybody can just do it if you have an XO.)

  You could write a script so that the you "paint" the picture of an
initial state and set it.

> I was planning to put in a rule-editing system not unlike Autocell:
> http://www.topshareware.com/Cellular-Automata-download-9567.htm
> (I couldn't find any pages about it, just the download link. Fairly  
> old Windows program.)

  Could you elaborate the rule-editing system of Autocell at any
chance (over the holidays^^;)?  I thought a rule-editting system in
which you can specify the before and after state visually is nice, and
also the concise description people use would be also nice for
different audience.  But of course there will be much more different
ways, I'm sure.

  Thank you!

-- Yoshiki