Using Golly's Scripting Tools to Analyze Larger than Life's Jitterbugs

Abstract

Larger than Life is a family of cellular automata proposed by David Griffeath that generalizes John Conway’s celebrated Game of Life to large neighborhoods and update rules based on birth and survival intervals. Golly is an open source application for exploring the Game of Life and, more recently, Larger than Life. In this exploratory paper, we present new scripts for the Golly software that help identify and analyze the complex trajectories of certain viable patterns in Larger than Life, known as “jitterbugs,” including the Game of Life’s famous glider. We describe the scripts’ limitations and ideas about how to surpass them.