Warp Life™
for the iPhone, iPad
and iPod Touch
Our personal take on the Cellular Automaton
known as John Conway's Game of Life.
Warp Life is now in Beta Test!
We could use your help in finding any remaining bugs, testing on a wider range of hardware than is available to us, and making suggestions as to how to improve the product. If you'd like to help out, we need some configuration information from your unit. Please follow the instructions on this page.
Warp Life is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life, which was invented by Computer Scientist John Conway in the early 1970s. It is the most-popular example of a class of computer program known as a Cellular Automaton.
Cellular Automata store their state in multidimensional grids. A set of rules propagates the grid state from generation to generation. The rules of Conway's Life are designed to yield visually interesting patterns as well as emergent behavior, but some Cellular Automata can be used to solve useful problems, and so are an important area of Computer Science research
Conway's Life uses a two-dimensional grid. A cell is either alive or dead. The fate of each cell in the next generation has to do with how many neighbors it has:
- If it has one or zero neighbors, it dies of loneliness.
- If it has four or more neighbors, it dies of overpopulation.
- If it has two neighbors, it stays the same. A dead cell remains dead; a living cell survives.
- If it has three neighbors, it will be alive. A living cell survives; a dead cell is born into a new living cell.
Rotating the Selection
What Makes Warp Life So Special?
Warp Life is Accellerated by Don Quixote™. While Algorithmic research into both generation propagation and display update is ongoing, Warp Life's speed already puts all of our competitors in the Apple iPhone App Store completely to shame!
There are many competing implementations of Conway's Game of Life.
The intrigue of Conway's Life comes from setting up initial grid states, either to see how they will evolve or to solve special challenges such as the construction of Space Ships, oscillating patterns that move a bit during each oscillation cycle.
To this end, Warp Life has a well-developed grid editing user interface.
Features
There are two modes, Run Mode and Edit Mode. You switch from on to the other by tapping the right-hand button in the Navigation Bar at the top of the screen.
Grid lines appear when in Edit Mode, to help you locate the cells you want to edit.
When in Edit Mode, you can single-tap to toggle cells between living or dead, or draw continuous lines of living or dead cells by dragging your finger.
Also in Edit Mode, you can select, resize and move rectangular areas with a two-finger pinch gesture, then use the user interface buttons to cut, copy and clear selections, as well paste from the Clipboard.
You can also Drag and Drop the selection.
Conway's rules are symmetric with respect to ninety degree rotations as well as horizontal and vertical reflections, yielding eight-way symmetry. To support exploration of the symmetry, you can rotate and reflect selections.
In Run Mode you can single-step or run continuously.
When running continuously, a slider allows you to adjust the generation propagation speed from quite fast to quite slow.
Scroll the screen in Run Mode with a single-finger drag gesture. Zoom in with a two-finger unpinch, zoom out with a two-finger pinch. You can zoom out as far as one screen pixel per cell.
You can save either your starting grid setup or the current grid setup in standard Run Length Encoded files. You can download these files from web sites such as the LifeWiki and import them into Warp Life via iTunes, then open them by tapping the Document icon that appears at the bottom of the Run Mode screen.
Run Length Encoded files are Plain Text files and not in binary format. The RLE Specification limits the length of each file line to seventy characters. Thus you can open your Run Length Encoded files in any text editor, copy them to the Clipboard, and paste them bodily into electronic mail messages as well as Usenet News and message board posts!
If you discover interesting new patterns, you can save your starting grids as Run Length Encoded files, then export your new files to your computer with iTunes to share with others over the Internet.
Thus, Warp Life is not only a fun and interesting game that anyone may enjoy, but truly a useful tool to the Computer Scientists who perform original research into Cellular Automata Algorithms.
Warp Life will be available from the App Store fo $4.99 after we complete Beta Testing and pass Apple's App Store qualification inspection.