Golly is an open source, cross-platform application for exploring Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata. A beta version of Golly 2.0 is now available for testing: http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.0b-win.zip (Windows 2000+) http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.0b-mac.zip (Mac OS 10.4+) http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.0b-gtk.tar.gz (Linux/GTK+ i386) There are a number of significant changes in this release: - Golly now supports multiple algorithms, and universes with more than 2 cell states. Tom Rokicki has extended Gosper's hashlife algorithm to allow up to 256 states, and that means Golly can handle many new types of CA. - The new JvN algorithm is a hashlife-based implementation of John von Neumann's 29-state CA. Inside Patterns/JvN you can find sphinx.mc, a self-replicating machine created by William R. Buckley, along with other smaller (faster) replicators created by Renato Nobili and Tim Hutton using 32-state variants of JvN's CA. - The new Generations algorithm supports an entire family of rules familiar to MCell users (Brian's Brain, Star Wars, Transers, etc). - The new RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms allow you to add new rules by creating .table or .tree files in the Rules folder. A number of example rules are supplied, including Langtons-Loops, Evoloop, and WireWorld. See Help > File Formats for more details about these files. (Much thanks to Tim Hutton who wrote the RuleTable algorithm and created all the .table rules.) - Golly gives you full control of how colors are assigned to cell states. Color schemes can be algorithm-specific, rule-specific or layer-specific. You also have the option of displaying icons (small bitmaps) instead of colored squares, but only at scales 1:8 or 1:16. - The Set Rule dialog can be expanded to show algorithm-specific help that includes clickable rules and clickable patterns. See Help > Changes for the complete list of changes. Please report any problems or suggestions to me (andrew@trevorrow.com) or Tom (rokicki@gmail.com). Or even better, subscribe to the golly-test mailing list (http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/golly-test) and post your feedback there. Have fun! Andrew (on behalf of the Golly Gang)