NAME:		life

AUTHOR INFO:	Chris Pudney
		Research Associate
		Biomedical Confocal Microscopy Research Centre
		Department of Pharmacology
		The University of Western Australia
		Nedlands, WA 6907, AUSTRALIA
		cpudney@alphapharm.pharm.uwa.edu.au

SOURCE FILES:	life.c

TYPE:		DATA

OUTPUTS:	field 2D 2-space 4-vector byte (image)

PARAMETERS:     Name			Type		Default	
		Width			Integer		150
		Height			Integer		150
		Generations		Integer		50
		Display Every		Integer		1
		Go!			Oneshot

DESCRIPTION:

Life is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life.  This is an algorithm
where cells propagate or die, based on the activity of the eight
neighbouring cells.  A live cell continues to live if it has two or three
live neighbours, otherwise it dies (of loneliness if there are too few
neighbours, or of overcrowding if there are too many).  A new cell is
created in empty cell, if the empty cell has exactly three live
neighbours.  Cells change colour as they age.

The user is able to control the dimensions of the world (Width x Height
cells), the number of generations to simulate and the frequency with which
to display simulation results.  A oneshot parameter "Go!" starts the
simulation.

This module was developed from Steve Thorpe's Life module, which was
developed for comparison with parallel implementations of Conway's Game of
Life.  In this implementation the memory used by the simulation has been
reduced and colours are used to indicate a module's age.

The output from this coroutine module is an AVS image, which can be
colourized and displayed using the colorizer and display_image modules.
progresses.  The user sees a visualization of the cells that are "alive"
for the current generation.

SAMPLE NETWORK:
	                
    generate colormap        life
                   |           |
                   -------     |
                         |     |
                        colorizer
                               |
                    display image