LifeLab 4.4 review

LifeLab is a game for exploring John Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 269K Developer: Andrew Trevorrow Buy Now Price: $20.00 Updated: 29 Nov 2005

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LifeLab is a game for exploring John Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata. CAs were first studied in the mid-1950s by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann.

The subject became much more widely known in 1970 when Life was described by Martin Gardner in his Scientific American column.

Life is played on an arbitrary-sized grid of square cells. Each cell has two states: "dead" or "alive".

Here are some key features of "LifeLab":
Change the rules and examine other forms of Life.
1D rules are also supported (using Wolfram's numbering scheme).
Change the grid topology: plane, torus, Klein bottle, etc.
View/edit/generate patterns at all power-of-two scales from 8 pixels per cell to 64 cells per pixel.
Automatic shifting and grid expansion if a pattern gets too big.
Automatic deletion of isolated gliders.
Automatic detection of oscillators and spaceships.
Search for new oscillators, spaceships, still lifes or methuselahs.
Cut/copy/paste patterns via the clipboard.
Read patterns in a variety of file formats.