Golly

Golly is intended for exploring Game of Life, a cellular automaton, used to study models of different complexity with applications in various scientific fields.

Despite its name, Game of Life is not an actual game in the traditional sense of the word. For instance, there are no players in this game, and apart from the initial configuration, there is no further interaction with it.

Having said that, it should be quite clear that Golly is not intended to play. Instead, it allows simulating the evolution of different types of real-world systems. Luckily, it comes with plenty of help documentation and samples.

Most of the screen space is occupied by an infinite two-dimensional grid with cells that can be “on” (alive) or “off” dead. The behavior of these cells is governed by rules that determine if a cell is alive or not based on the state of its neighboring cells. What is surprising about this is how these simple rules may give rise to extremely complex evolving patterns.

You can start by loading a pattern from file but it is also possible to draw it yourself. Likewise, you can pick one of the available algorithms: QuickLife, HashLife, Generations, Larger than Life, IvN and RuleLoader. There is the possibility to access data like the current population. Your patterns can be saved to RLE file. Still, it would be good if it were possible to save videos.

All in all, most experts agree that Golly is the app of its type supporting most features. Likewise, it is also very light and speedy. The application is very simple to use, despite the evidently complex mathematical algorithms working “under the hood”. In addition to its ability to predict the behavior of a given system, for example, how fast a disease can spread, Golly is also fun to see how your own patterns change with time. Fortunately, this product is cross-platform and opensource.