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Thread: For Math Freaks and Uber Computer Geeks

  1. 09-13-2010, 02:27 PM #1
    n2ize
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    For Math Freaks and Uber Computer Geeks

    An interesting cross platform app For exploring Conway's "Game of Life" and other models of cellular automata. has many interesting features including Bill Gosper's hashing/life algorithms, guns, gliuder guns, and more.

    I tried running it on my fedora 11 Linux system. Runs but get some nasty crashes when i try and access some functions. I think it has to do with one of my libraries being a bit out of date. I might try again with a slightly older version.

    If anyone else tries to install/run this I'd be interested to know the results.

    http://golly.sourceforge.net/
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  2. 09-13-2010, 03:22 PM #2
    KC2UGV
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    I grabbed it. It does look packed with pre-loaded start scenarios. Runs super fast on my low-end machine too.
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  3. 09-13-2010, 04:04 PM #3
    n2ize
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    Quote Originally Posted by KC2UGV View Post
    I grabbed it. It does look packed with pre-loaded start scenarios. Runs super fast on my low-end machine too.
    What kind of machine are you running it on and what OS version... I keep getting function call errors... Looks like an issue with the GTK libraries. I'm gonna try running it on a more recently updated machine and see if I get better luck.
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  4. 09-13-2010, 04:44 PM #4
    NQ6U
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    Working okay here under Ubuntu 2.30.2 on a MacBook Pro, although I only ran it for about ten minutes.
    All the world’s a stage, but obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.
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  5. 09-13-2010, 05:59 PM #5
    NQ6U
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    The Mac OS X version runs well too. No problems at all.
    All the world’s a stage, but obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.
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  6. 09-14-2010, 06:30 AM #6
    n2ize
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    Okay, I figured out the problem by doing some Googling. The error I get when "golly" crashes is a symbol lookup error..."undefined symbol gzopen64". this is most commonly due to a missing library... or library built without the appropriate function call. It turns out that "golly" was developed on Ubuntu which uses a distro specific modified version of zlib. The versions of zlib available on Fedora and other distros apparently don't include "gzopen64" nor does the official version of zlib...believe it or not.... Soooo... what does that mean for me ? I have to download the source zlib package for Ubuntu, compile it and install on my Fedora system and set my local LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to the location of the modified Ubuntu version and then the whole shebang should run.

    Around here when it don't wuyk we MAKE it wuyk. Luckilly I seem to have found the source tarball for Ubuntu zlib.

    Maybe if it works it would be a good idea for me to build a golly rpm for Fedora systems. Unless it.s been done already.
    Last edited by n2ize; 09-14-2010 at 06:34 AM.
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  7. 09-14-2010, 03:22 PM #7
    n2ize
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    latest Update !!! SUCCESS !!. I wound up downloading the source code tarball for the simulator and I compiled it on my system. But before it would compile I had to install a bunch of Perl modules that handle Perl embedding. Once I did that "golly" compiled and now it's running with no errors.
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  8. 09-14-2010, 03:26 PM #8
    KC2UGV
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    What do you think of it? I'm no math geek, I'm a computer nerd, so all I know is that it runs much faster than some of the other GOL sims I've played with.
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  9. 09-15-2010, 06:58 AM #9
    n2ize
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    Quote Originally Posted by KC2UGV View Post
    What do you think of it? I'm no math geek, I'm a computer nerd, so all I know is that it runs much faster than some of the other GOL sims I've played with.
    Only played with it a little bit so far. So far I get the same impression. Also, seems a bit more robust than most of the other desktop GOL sims I've tried. As I play around with it some more I'll give some further impressions.,
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