Cody Boone Ferguson
af5482825c
The sections have been modified a fair amount. The Entries menu has been extended to have: Fixing entries, Updating author info, Thanks for the help. The first two were moved from FAQ and the last one from About. The rationale for these, in order: entries and authors have to do with entries and most of the help involves entries. It also has to do with website but in 'about' it does not seem the right place, unless maybe it is renamed to 'Credits' or something (I am not suggesting this one way or the other). This one is debatable but that was the rationale. The Status menu has been extended to have: Markdown guidelines and Security policy. The rationale is that the markdown guidelines are part of contest guidelines and the security policy is about the status of the entries and how if there are any security problems they will not be addressed (instead of about the IOCCC). The FAQ was extended to have: Compiling entries, Running entries, How to help. The reason to not have compiling and running entries under Entries is because this is 'how to' and also the menu was too long. How to help seems like a good idea under FAQ too (was in About). About was extended to have the new 'about.html' page (from about.md). This is a rare case where a new file is useful as it fits under 'About'. The menu now is: Home page, About the IOCCC, The Judges, Contact us. I was pondering the 'About [the IOCCC]' at the top and also naming it 'About us' but it seemed like a link to index.html was necessary and as for 'about us' it seemed less clear as to whether it was about the judges or the contest itself. The FAQ has been updated slightly for this. After further inspection the bin/index.html and the inc/index.html links were removed from the about section. With these changes, renaming an item or slight reordering notwithstanding, I believe that #2006 is probably in good shape.
To build:
make all
To use:
./dgibson.sh [datafile]
where:
datafile is the initial pattern (default is the
dgibson.data1 file).
Try:
./try.sh
Judges' remarks:
We have provided the shell script dgibson.sh to make it easier to run this entry. Run this shell script several times to see what happens.
There are a number of data files available:
For dgibson.data5 you will need a large screen, lots of virtual memory and lots of time! The try.sh script will run dgibson.sh on all the data files.
Good luck trying to use a debugger on this entry! Life is not always pretty.
Author's remarks:
This program plays the Game of Life.
Life is a cellular automaton invented by J. H. Conway, in which each of a rectangular grid of cells can be alive or dead, and cells with more than 3 or less than 2 (out of 8) live neighbours die, and empty cells with exactly 3 neighbours give birth.
Some notes
- the "STAT n" information does not have to be present in the initial configuration
- the initial configuration should not have live cells around the edges
- the grid should be a perfect rectangle.
Further features: the current generation number is preserved, and the grid automatically resizes itself as the object gets too big or too small.
When writing this program, my goal was to make each cell in the life
grid expand to the code which calculates the fate of that cell. In
addition, the resulting program is a single expression, which makes it
necessary to recurse main() in two "directions" simultaneously.