LifeHistory

Introduction

The LifeHistory rule is a seven-state superset of HistoricalLife, allowing optional ON and OFF "marked" cells as well as history cells, as well as a "start" ON state (#5), and a "killer" OFF state (#6) intended to be used when impermeable boundaries are needed (e.g. to separate subpatterns in a large stamp collection). This borrows ideas and colors from Brice Due's "BeforeAfterChange" rule variants from Mirek's Cellebration.

Details

Cell state 3 (marked ON = white) and state 5 ("start" ON = yellow) will change to State 4 (marked OFF = red) when they die, and back to State 3 if they turn on again later. State 6 is gray. Normal ON cells are green, as in the optimized HistoricalLife rule. State 3 is a slightly greenish white to differentiate it from standard colors for two-state Life, and State 2 is a darker shade of blue than in HistoricalLife.

Pasting standard Life or HistoricalLife patterns into a LifeHistory universe works cleanly, and the reverse is mostly true, too -- any marked cells are lost. Pasting HistoricalLife or LifeHistory patterns into a regular two-state universe is fairly painful, because State 2 or 4 cells are automatically reduced to State 1 (instead of State 0). In these cases, the conversion scripts should be used.

Python and Perl scripts included in the LifeHistory archive file make it easy to switch back and forth in Golly 2.0 between LifeHistory and standard two-state Life, even while a pattern is generating. See the included readme.txt for more details.