RIP John Conway

[mwieder]

John Conway died last week of complications from Covid-19.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/04/ ... e-dies-age

In memoriam I created a LiveCode implementation of his Game of Life. I've tweaked it to be as fast as I could, but if anyone has any additional ways to get more speed out of this thing, feel free to dig in.

[bogs]

Interesting stuff Mark!

[mwieder]

That was way too slow, so I fasted it using arrays.

[richmond62]

I fasted it

Ramadan!

[SWEdeAndy]

Oh, this idea was also presented in the LiveCode User Group on Facebook a few months ago:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/livecod ... 928433472/

Not many jumped on that train (nobody but me actually), but my contribution can be downloaded here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... 4cw_CjyCuz
(Both standalones Mac/PC and the LC stack)

Indeed, mine is way faster...

/Andreas

[mwieder]

Oh, nicely done, Andreas. I didn't realize there was a FB group.
Would be nice, I think, if the mothership could consolidate some of these Balkanized resources.
But I'm going to retire my version now - yours is much nicer (and faster as well).

[SWEdeAndy]

Thanks! It was fun creating it. I cheated on the boundary handling though - it's not infinite, so patterns crossing the boundary don't follow the rules. I should fix that, if I could find the time.

Concerning the Balkanized resources, for FB it's even worse; there are TWO LC user groups:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/livecodeusers/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/livecode.developers/

Having almost the same number of members (probably mostly the same people joining both, like me).
Merging them would be a good first step. But they are user-managed, so nothing to do with the mothership...

[richmond62]

Concerning the Balkanized resources

As someone who lives and works in the Balkans (Bulgaria): and extremely glad
I don't have Serbians living next door, I appreciate some aspects of Balkanisation.

This does, at least, mean that different groups with different focuses can
peacefully co-exist rather than one "super" group where things are not very super
because there is squabbling about which focus should predominate.

https://www.facebook.com/RMLCclasses/

https://www.facebook.com/Richmonds-Gent ... 377065389/

[SWEdeAndy]

This does, at least, mean that different groups with different focuses can
peacefully co-exist rather than one "super" group where things are not very super
because there is squabbling about which focus should predominate.

Of course, when motivated it's great to have different groups for different things.

But the two general LC user groups I mentioned are indeed very general with no focus at all, just being for "LC user/developer" discussions (at least as far as I can see). People often cross-post as there is no way of seeing if a question would be better answered in one or the other.
But I suppose some squabble in the past has caused this situation, somehow still preventing a merge, so I leave it to those concerned to solve...

[FourthWorld]

...the two general LC user groups I mentioned are indeed very general with no focus at all, just being for "LC user/developer" discussions (at least as far as I can see). People often cross-post as there is no way of seeing if a question would be better answered in one or the other.
But I suppose some squabble in the past has caused this situation, somehow still preventing a merge, so I leave it to those concerned to solve...

I can't recall which of those two Facebook groups came first, but they've both been around so many years it doesn't matter much.

The one in my sigline ("Livecode Users") is moderated by the company's appointed Community Liaison (yours truly) along with several others, and is open to everyone. As with these forums, we exercise very little moderation controlling the content shared there, and only where content strays from FB's ToS. The group is set to Public and we welcome everyone with an interest in LiveCode:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/livecodeusers/

The other group ("Livecode Developers") is a personal project of a LiveCode developer who has made many useful contributions to our community in the past, and while I admire much of his enthusiasm for LiveCode we differ strongly in moderation priorities. Censorship has been observed there by many users over the years, often without warning or even any guidance on how to avoid it. I've seen replies supportive of both the requestor and of LiveCode deleted with no explanation, and others have written to me about similar experiences there. And from time to time members have been banned from the group without explanation, including myself. Attempts to resolve the matter have met with no reply.

In contrast, as you'll find in these LiveCode forums, the LiveCode Users Group on Facebook does not generally censor any content. Exceptions are consistent with the Forum Guidelines used here, where deletion of content happens only for posts promoting illegal activity, harmful or irrelevant spamming, malware links, etc. We aim for all company-approved online communities to be as friendly and inclusive as we can safely provide. The moderation consistency between these Forums and the LC Users Group on Facebook is helped by having many of the same moderators supporting both.

And while we're discussing social media, let me please also encourage you to consider visiting the LiveCode group on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/50811/

LinkedIn is an especially valuable social media platform for us, given its unique focus on professional interests. It's currently less active than the FB group, but lately not by much. Moreover, it has has a larger audience, with a higher percentage of newcomers to LC posting in it. Tom Glod has taken a keen interest in helping to promote the group, and given LinkedIn's focus I can think of few other venues more well suited to raising LC's visibility among business decision-makers. If you're on LinkedIn I hope to see you there.

[richmond62]

I, also, have a LinkedIn account, and the whole thing strikes me as much less active and dynamic than
the LiveCode forums.

[SWEdeAndy]

Thanks Richard, for explaining the FB groups issue. I had some notion that this was the case, but knew no details, so I tried to touch the subject neutrally.

Good reminder about the LinkedIn group too! I'm a member since some time, but have missed the latest posts. I've updated my notification settings now.

The challenge is just digesting all these groups/forums/email lists etc, it's a little too scattered I sometimes feel. But then again, there are worse problems in this world...

[FourthWorld]

Good reminder about the LinkedIn group too! I'm a member since some time, but have missed the latest posts. I've updated my notification settings now.

Less active now, but I share Tom Glod's enthusiasm for the potential to grow engagement there on LinkedIn.

The challenge is just digesting all these groups/forums/email lists etc, it's a little too scattered I sometimes feel. But then again, there are worse problems in this world...

It seems to be a natural by-product of mature products and their communities. LC predates social media, and in the early days had only an email list, as was customary in those days. When web-based forums became popular the company added this one, and it remains the most active user-to-user resource. If you need to pick only one, this is a good choice.

Tip: If you show up here often, I've found it helpful to bookmark the "New Posts" link rather than the front page. That way each time you arrive you'll see a listing of only those threads new and updated since you were last here. And if you need the full listing of all topics it's still just a click away.

[Thierry]

Oh, nicely done, Andreas.
yours is much nicer (and faster as well).

Yes, a nice stack indeed.

Last sunday, as a brain training exercise,
I've spent a couple of hours to see
how I could make your stack behave faster.

Here are some results for this seed:

It's an animated gif (double-click on it)


Yours runs 105 generations in ~27 seconds / 2.32 gens/sec

Mine runs 105 generations in ~6 seconds / 9.55 gens/sec

So, a bit more than 4 times faster.

Made with LC 9.6 on MacOS, not tested on Win nor Linux:

Go here to get the stack:

https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.p ... 44#p191844



Regards,

Thierry

[SWEdeAndy]

Thanks for the improvements, Thierry. I learn a lot from comparing your code with mine.
On my Mac, my version gets around 4 gens/sec with your test seed after 105 gens, slightly less with bigger/growing patterns.
With your version I get 9-14 gens /sec, depending on pattern size, so around 3-4 times the speed indeed. Very good!

Faster than that and it would be hard for the eye to follow the pattern changes, which would make it less entertaining to watch.