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#7 Allternate Tessellations

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nobody
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5
2005-11-26
2005-11-26
David Lowenstein
No

Suggestion: Use Golly to break out of the traditional
Life framework by offering a hexagonal grid as an
option in addition to the usual square grid.

There are three ways of tiling an infinite plane with a
single regular polygon (of a single size): 1. Squares;
2. Hexagons; 3. Triangles. There is no software (that
I know of) that attempts to expand John Conway's idea
beyond squares. Golly could be the first.

Discussion

  • Tomas Rokicki

    Tomas Rokicki - 2006-06-24

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    Thanks for the feedback; we shall certainly consider it!

    There is a lot of work on hexagonal Life (just do a search)
    and some really cool programs. Unfortunately it seems the
    most interesting hexagonal life rules use a larger
    neighborhood (12 neighbors) to calculate the next state, and
    this would require a significant change to the internal
    golly algorithms.

    Luckily we've made those algorithms quite pluggable (not
    perfectly, but not too bad) so it would not be horrible to
    extend them.

    We have some interesting plans in this direction, but I'm
    not sure when we'll have the time or energy to actually make
    them come to fruition.

     

  • Andrew Trevorrow

    Andrew Trevorrow - 2009-12-03

    I recently added a number of new rules to the
    Rule Table Repository showing how to emulate
    hexagonal and triangular grids on a square grid.
    If using Golly 2.1 just go to Help > Online Archives
    > Rule Table Repository and download the files
    from the appropriate sections.

    Maybe one day we'll display such rules on a true
    hexagonal/triangular grid.