Telsa Gwynne Ali Abdin 2000 Telsa Gwynne 2000 Ali Abdin documentation in progress Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. You may obtain a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. Many of the names used by companies to distinguish their products and services are claimed as trademarks. Where those names appear in any GNOME documentation, and those trademarks are made aware to the members of the GNOME Documentation Project, the names have been printed in caps or initial caps. gLife is an artificial life implementation using GNOME as its front-end. It uses some principles of cellular automata. It's similar in appearance to Conway's "Game of Life" but uses very different rules. Eventually it should demonstrate growth of little societies. What this means for those not into AI is that gLife draws a grid, populates it with animals represented by blobs of different colours, and then updates the grid. You can watch the animals grow in numbers, group together, move away, reproduce, and eventually die (aww). You can configure much of the appearance of gLife to your own preferences, although the rules for how the animals behave remain the same. gLife is a work in progress, as is this guide to it. The documentation may lag. This documentation was last updated to describe gLife version 0.2. Start glife by typing glife at the command line, or by selecting Programs Games gLife . gLife begins with a window displaying a 25x25 grid on the left. On the right a window with a selection of buttons beneath it: Continue, Pause, Terrain info and Animal info. Two Co-ordinate boxes complete the choice. A standard menubar is at the top of the gLife window. To begin a simulation, open the File menu and select Start simulation. The Pause button will become available from the main screen, and the simulation will begin. You can watch your animals growing and moving in the varied terrain of the main grid and watch the summaries for each turn in the window to the right. The simulation will end naturally, unless you have made your animals immortal, but you can halt it yourself if you want. To end a simulation, open the File menu and select End simulation. The animals must stop moving before you can end the turn. This means it will be harder to end a simulation with really fast timeouts. gLife has three main menus, explained below: Parts of this menu are only accessible at different times. Start simulation Starts a new simulation. The only menu option which is accessible initially. It is only accessible when no simulation is running: either actively, or paused. Restart simulation Restarts the simulation from turn one again, using the same animals and terrain. It is only available when a simulation is running but has been paused. End simulation Ends the simulation and clears the grid. Exit What it says. Exits gLife and closes the window. This option is always available. There is only one option available on the Settings Menu: that of Preferences. See the section about things to fiddle with for details. There are two options on the Help Menu: gLife Documentation This option is what brought you to this guide to gLife. Well, probably. About This option brings up a dialogue box with information about gLife: its author, copyright details, version number, and website location. If at any stage you want more information on a particular animal or piece of terrain, you can get it. Click the Pause button on the main screen and fill in the co-ordinates of the location you are interested in. Selecting Terrain info or Animal Info will then give you more details: the amount of food available there, whether an animal is present, the age of the animal and so on. The preferences menu item from the Settings Menu produces a new window containing three sections. The contents of these can be customised to your choice. Two options, currently: Initial number of animals You can increase or decrease the number of animals you start with here. You can either focus your mouse pointer in the box and type in the number you want, or you can use the arrow-shaped buttons to alter the number. The default is 150 animals. The range is from 2 animals to 625. Milliseconds per update gLife updates at regular intervals. By default, the interval is 1.5 seconds. You can type in a new number when the mouse pointer is focused in the box, or use the arrow-shaped buttons to alter it. The range is from 100ms to 9999ms (one tenth of a second to just under ten seconds). Be warned that very fast updates will require a lot of CPU to redraw the screen so fast and make it difficult to end the simulation. For setting your favourite colours and other display options. Colour animals by sex As it suggests, colour animals by sex controls whether animals are coloured by sex or not. The default is that they are. Male animal colour Clicking on male animal colour brings up the GNOME colour selector for you to change the colour of the little boy animals. They begin as blue and slightly transparent. Female animal colour Clicking on female animal colour brings up the GNOME colour selector for you to change the colour of the little girl animals. They begin as red and slightly transparent. Terrain colour Clicking on terrain colour brings up the GNOME colour selector for you to change the colour of the terrain. Terrain begins as opaque yellow; and the larger the area of a square on the grid which is coloured, the more food is available there. Enable grid display Clicking on enable grid display toggles whether the lines of the grid are drawn or not. The default is is that they are drawn. Disabling this speeds up the redrawing of the display slightly. Enable terrain display Clicking on enable terrain display toggles whether or not the terrain is drawn in. The default is to draw it. Disabling this speeds up the redrawing of the display greatly. Enable animals display Clicking on enable animals display toggles whether or not the animals themselves are drawn. The default, not surprisingly, is that animals are drawn. Disabling it moderately speeds up redrawing of the display -- but of course you don't see the animals then... You can give your animals an upper age limit or range. When they reach that stage they will die. (Aww!). Their default age range is between 75-100 but can be set to any range between 50 and 115. If you want your animals to be immortal, you can unselect enforce age limits by clicking on it. Allow reproduction The allow reproduction checkbox must be on for the settings underneath to have any effect. It is enabled by default. Minimum reproduction age The minimum reproduction age box allows you to decide how old animals must be to reproduce. The default is eighteen and the range is from one to thirty-five. Minimum food needed for reproduction The minimum food for reproduction box allows you to decide how much food is necessary for reproduction. The default is 25 and the range is from zero to 250. Percentage of food to give children The percentage of food to give children box determines how much of the animal's food it will give to its offspring. The default is 50% and the range is from zero to 99%. gLife generates terrain and animals with initial attributes, which are listed below. For generating the terrain: A maximum amount of food found on each section of terrain is set. This maximum is currently 250. The food found there at the start is a random amount between 1 and 250. The rate that food can regenerate on the terrain is set. The maximum rate would be 5 units a turn. When creating new animals, a new animal has a variety of characteristics which are currently: Sex Sex is either male or female: a simple 50:50 chance. Age A new animal starts as 1. Vision Vision is generated but not yet used. Food issues The animal has two food characteristics: its metafood value (its metabolism) and its food storage: foodstore. These are not yet used. Speed The animal's speed is generated, and determines how many units of space it can move in a turn. Positioning The animal's position on the grid is generated as a X co-ordinate and a Y co-ordinate, and it starts there. gLife is under active development. The following are the rules planned and whether they are implemented yet or not: The terrain should regenerate food each turn. Status: not yet done. If older than the maximum age permitted, then die. Status: done. Look around you for a spot that is on the grid and not another animal's territory. Move to that spot. Status: done. Use of vision: vision will allow an animal to see <vision> units around it. This will be used to identify terrain with a lot of food and to spot predators. Status: not yet implemented. Use of speed: some animals will be able to move further per turn than other animals. Each animal will be able to move <speed> units per turn. Status: (hot from the press at last revising of this manual!) done. Reproduction: if you are old enough and have enough food, then look around for a member of the opposite sex which is also old enough and has enough food. If there is an empty space around you both, then reproduce. If any of these conditions are not met, then don't. Status: Done. An animal can reproduce multiple times if the above conditions are met (for each animal surrounding it). If there are four females surrounding one male, the male will check the conditions and, if possible, mate. The rules used for inheritance are Mendelian: the child has a 25% chance of inheriting both traits from the father, a 25% chance of inheriting both traits from the mother, and a 50% chance of inheriting one from each. Traits are: Vision and metabolism are grouped together as a trait. Speed and maximum age are grouped together as a trait. Use of food and metabolism: Metafood is its metabolism: every turn, the animal will eat <metafood> units from its <foodstore> amount. It will also collect food from the terrain into its <foodstore>. Status: not yet implemented. Animals may become diseased. Status: not yet implemented. Predators may be introduced. Status: not yet done, and not too likely. Combat will be introduced. Status: not yet done. gLife has no bugs known at the moment. Limitations: Some of the planned features are not yet implemented. They are listed in the rules page and marked as such. glife was written by Ali Abdin (aliabdin@aucegypt.edu) For more information about it, see the gLife home page or the author's development diary. Please send all comments, suggestions and bug reports to the author or to the bug-tracker at its web site. glife is not currently listed on the GNOME bug-tracker, so please don't use that for this program. This manual was written by Telsa Gwynne (telsa@linuxchix.org) and revised (extensively!) by Ali Abdin (aliabdin@aucegypt.edu).