rlife

A life library written in Rust.

It is a library that aims at manipulating life cellular automata grids. For now it supports:

• toroidal and resizable grids
• loading and saving files containing grid data
• stepping forward the generations of a grid (if it is a resizable grid, it will make sure the pattern is always at the center of the grid)

What this library aims at

• Support for distributed and parallel computation of grids' operations (GPUs and networking).
• Usage of machine learning for pattern analysis.

About the file formats used

For now, rlife uses two internal file formats: Resizable Life and Toroidal Life.

Resizable Life

This file format is close to the Life 1.06 format:

• The "#Resizable Life" is followed by optional description lines, which begin with "#D". Leading and trailing spaces are ignored.
• Next comes an optional rule specification. The patterns in the collection here enforce "Normal" Conway rules using the "#N" specifier. Alternate rules use "#R" ("#N" is exactly the same as "#R 23/3"). Rules are encoded as Survival/Birth, each list being a string of digits representing neighbor counts. Since there are exactly eight possible neighbors in a Conway-like rule, there is no need to separate the digits, and "9" is prohibited in both lists.
• And finally comes a list of (x y) coordinates with live cells.

Toroidal Life

This file format is close to the Life 1.06 format:

• The "#Toroidal Life" is followed by optional description lines, which begin with "#D". Leading and trailing spaces are ignored.
• Next comes an optional rule specification. The patterns in the collection here enforce "Normal" Conway rules using the "#N" specifier. Alternate rules use "#R" ("#N" is exactly the same as "#R 23/3"). Rules are encoded as Survival/Birth, each list being a string of digits representing neighbor counts. Since there are exactly eight possible neighbors in a Conway-like rule, there is no need to separate the digits, and "9" is prohibited in both lists.
• Next there is a line like this "#S " which define the size of the grid.
• And finally comes a list of (x y) coordinates with live cells.