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A Word from the Texinfo Editor

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science
keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was awful lot of fun."
-- Alan J. Perlis

Well, when it began I was a 16 year old hacker at Hittorf Gymnasium, Recklinghausen, sitting in front of an Apple ][, with my eyes staring into the whole new world beyond the terminal screen.

In one of the first lessons in Pascal programming our exercise was to write a program defined by a certain set of rules, which incorporated a 2-dimensional array structure, loop statements and lots of arithmetic comparisons. By that time, I didn't know anything about cellular automata, nor did I know the German word -- zellulärer Automat. All what mattered was, that is was easy to code, and awful lot of fun to watch how cells die, get born or whole "objects" move across the grid. Though it was sometimes painfully slow, under the Apple Pascal's p-system.

To make things even more enjoyable, we agreed to write a graphics front end in our spare time we wrote such a beast, using Apple Pascal's turtlegraphics unit. "We" were Christian Weber, now a physician, Bernd Paffenholz, now a mathematican and I, a computer scientist. The offspring of this project was a real Game of Life: Two players put their black and white colored beasts (cells) onto the playground, then the "clock" was started and Life began. The player with more beasts left than the other's won the race.

These rules, obviously, lead to a certain strategy of game playing:

try to find a certain pattern of cells with a desired behaviour, on your own, e.g. static ones, like the "block," or oscillating (hard to detect for your competitor), or moving (to destroy your competitors objects)
test these constructs against your competitor's ones
if your opponent wins, write a search program to find new, hopefully "better" constructs

The latter never happened, as far as I can remember, all this happened almost a decade ago. Now, I know that David never knew our version of the "Game of Life," but I was pretty amazed when I read his series of articles in comp.theory.cellular-automata. And thus started over to make this thing "a doodle."

Too bad, I guess I'd won every race with his online companion at hand!

Enjoy!

Jörg Heitkötter
Systems Analysis Research Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Dortmund, germany.
<joke@ls11.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>

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