Since I set up a Linux system for my parents, brothers, and sisters this summer, my family has been getting comfortable with Linux. One of my brother's favorite programs is GTKLife, an implementation of the Game of Life that allows 1M x 1M cells (10^12 cells total) and runs quite fast. Years ago we had a different Game of Life implementation with an interesting two-color feature that made it especially fun to play. So, as a Christmas gift for my brother, I enhanced GTKLife with a similar two-color feature and fixed some minor bugs. I call it GTKLifeBattle.

The patch for gtklife-4.0 is downloadable from the sketches page. Once I finished, I realized how cool it was that I was able to apply my software development skills to make a homemade gift. Since I derived it from existing code, it only took 20-30 hours rather than the 100 or more hours it would take if I started from scratch.

I'm going to submit the patch to the author of GTKLife, but she may have concerns about the possible reduction in speed. For each cell, it now computes not only the next Life generation but also the color. It uses fast table lookups, so the speed reduction is not noticeable unless you're measuring.