Game of Lives for Palm by Tapani Raiko

Game of Lives (v1.3, 16kb) is a public domain game for PalmOS.
No warranty. Play against your Palm!
Warning: Please remove an older version before updating.

What is Game of Lives?

Game of Lives is a two player variant of the famous Game of Life.

Do you know Game of Life?

Yes

Players place cells on the board trying to get twice the number of cells as the opponent. At some points, Game of Life iterations are made. Colour of a born cell is derived from the majority rule but otherwise the rules of Game of Life apply.

No

You can find the rules below. They might seem complicated, in which case you may wish to first take a look at the original zero player game.

Installation

The lives.prc is the only file you need to install. Uninstalling the old version beforehand is recommended.
Uninstallation is simple: just delete the program and it will go away. The game takes about 22kb.

Rules

The order of moves is the following: Red (black) and Yellow (white) player alternately get N moves on N times N board (for example, with boardsize 9, Red gets 5 moves and Yellow 4 moves). Then the sequence (Yellow, Life, Yellow, Red, Life, Red) is repeated until the winning player gets at least 2/3 of all living cells after the life step. If the board gets empty, the game ends in a draw.

The moves of the two players are to place a cell of one's own colour to an empty point. The Life step corresponds to the rules of the Game of Life. A cell lives if it has 2 or 3 cells in its 8-neighbourhood. A new cell is born in an empty point, if there is exactly 3 cells in the 8-neighbourhood. The colour of the new cells is determined by majority.

User Interface

The game is played by tapping the squares on the board. For the life step you can tap anywhere on the board. Starting a new game and selecting options is possible using the menu. The delay option applies between life and palm moves.

The status bar below the board indicates the 5 next turns (from left to right) and the balance between the red and yellow (black and white) cells.

Version History

Version

Release date

Comments

v1.3

Mar 27, 2003

Bigger graphics for the small board, three AI levels, gray-scale version in the same file, delay options

v1.2

Sep 16, 2002

Three boardsizes, turn and balance indicator.

v1.1

Sep 2, 2002

Separate monochrome version. Increased randomness in level 2.

v1.0

Aug 30, 2002

First release.

Credits

John Conway

Invention of the Game of Life

Tapani Raiko

Adaptation to 2 players and implementation

Jaakko Peltonen

Useful discussions

Rodney Topor

Bug reports and suggestions

Sininen Villisika

Beta testing

Links

Send comments, questions and even thanks to: atarigo@myrealbox.com
Game of Lives (this page)
What is the Game of Life?
Go81 for Palm by Tapani Raiko
AtariGo for Palm by Tapani Raiko
Selected freeware for Palm
NetHack Falcon's Eye for Windows by Jaakko Peltonen
Wasp Games Pocket PC games by Osmo Suvisaari