Landon Curt Noll
f29b37e49a
Prepare for the winners of **IOCCC28**. > However these are not the 2024 droids you are looking for. :-) The HTML menu (both JavaScript and non-JavaScript) has been updated. The `Status -> Rules and guidelines' have been replaced with two separate menus `Status -> IOCCC rules` and `Status -> IOCCC guidelines`. Added a new top level `social.html` page: built from a new `social.md`. Sorted rules for building specific web pages in the top level `Makefile`. Added `make social` to make the `social.html` page from `social.md`. The `bin/gen-top-html.sh` now is able to process a argument of **social** to process the new top level `social.html` page. Changed `bin/gen-top-html.sh` VERSION from "2.0.0 2025-03-13" to "2.0.1 2025-07-25". Below `About -> Home page` a new `About -> IOCCC social media` menu item as added. Because the menu change touched every HTML file, we changed the general copyright date range for HTML files from "1984-2024" to "1984-2025" due to the extensive changes made for **IOCCC28**. Those markdown files that were modified in 2025 had their copyright date range also changed from "1984-2024" to "1984-2025". Rebuilt tarballs and sitemap due to the extensive HTML rebuilding. Ran `make update` to perform the above.
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.