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Game of Life in Postscript

smashr writes "It never really occured to me that postscript could be used for something other than printing, until I came across this page. Evidently someone has written the classic 'Game of life' entirely in postscript. You can even send it to the printer and have it output every single iteration.. now that would be a fun prank."

16 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. wow by Kipper+the+Llama · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sad memories of being a nine year old loser are flooding my brain at the mere mention of "The Game of Life".

  2. It would be cooler if... by zutroy · · Score: 1, Funny

    ...it auto-generated ASCII porn.

  3. OS by spikexyz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ok, someone write an OS in it.

    1. Re:OS by spun · · Score: 3, Funny

      Hehe, I just read that Conway's Game of Life itself is Turing Complete: you can make a universal Turing Machine in Life. Therefore, you could write an OS that runs on Life, which could run on any machine that runs Life, including PostScript.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  4. And I thought it meant... by Chicane-UK · · Score: 3, Funny

    ..THIS game of life.. I couldn't quite understand out how that was going to work as it got spewed out of a printer :)

    --
    "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
  5. Life Shmife... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'll wait for the Quake port.

  6. Re:PostScript Fractals by erl · · Score: 2, Funny

    I wrote a mandelbrot program in postscript once. Tiny, but it took hours for the printer to print it, to the dismay of everyone behind me in the printer queue.

  7. stupid postscript tricks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    My own personal contribution to the world of stupid postscript tricks wasn't nearly as productive as this one. But I promise you it was funnier!

    I wrote a program that substitutes occurances of one string with another one. You send it to the printer than laugh as everyone else's pages mysteriously have the word "this" replaced with "that". One time I loaded it on just before a friend printed his source code. He couldn't figure out for the life of him where his semicolons had gone! Ah... youth.

    The best part is, the code stays resident until the printer is power cycled. This enables slightly more sinster uses for this sort of thing. One of my professors used to joke about using as program like this to change the numbers on his paycheck when it was being printed!

    The code is still on my website near the bottom. It's called PSReplace.

    1. Re:stupid postscript tricks by unborn · · Score: 2, Funny

      This is interesting.

      Now, however, everybody will know Duane Bailey has forged his/her own paychecks.

    2. Re:stupid postscript tricks by MattCohn.com · · Score: 2, Funny

      Ditto. I'm replacing 'Sincerely,' with 'Sexyfully Yours,'

  8. Re: Easy by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1, Funny
    First designate 3 or more variables will we call buffers to represent poles to hold stacks of data. Then declare some double scripted arrays we will call discs. The number in the array will determine the size of the disc.

    Now write a towers of hanio program utilizing the n-1 algorithm.

    Using the 3 or more poles you created to move all the discs from smallest to largest from pole1 to polex (x being the greatest number or the opposite pole). Use the second pole as a temporary holding area.

  9. Please forgive me by mabu · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ok, I am finally prompted to write this... please forgive me but I feel compelled to comment.

    There are two other times when I came to the realization that the tech community was sometimes way lost beyond the boundaries of practicality in addition to this latest thing. Once upon touring MIT and seeing the amazing amount of intellect dedicated towards uber mundane pursuits such as remotely identifying the inventory of a coke machine, and another situation at Siggraph seeing tens of millions of dollars wasted on research projects that had a snowball's chance in hell of developing practical applications for the findings.

    Now I can appreciate the pursuit of a tech solution to something that's of interest, and I understand that things like Star Wars in ASCII are projects borne of love, but at the same time, I wonder, do tech people every try to achieve both in the same breath? Yes, you can add an ant farm to your PC case. But if you ever wonder why the mainstream looks at tech types as total weirdos, it's because they love to use as an example, these weird manifestations of our ability, when we all know, these are more the exception than the rule. Or are they?

    So my question is, aside from the arguments where someone draws a reasoned path explaining how a tennis shoe with voice recognition will change society, is anyone concerned about the image of the tech community and finding more realistic ways to demonstrate the creativity and resourcefulness of nerds?

  10. Re:Go Game in 5 lines of PostScript by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Funny
    ????

    Is that a postscript or perl program?

    That is the most obfuscated program I think I have ever seen.

  11. Re: Sending each iteration to the printer by matt_beall · · Score: 3, Funny

    Woohoo! Now I can have that flip book story of evolution I've always wanted!

  12. Was I the only one.... by stygar · · Score: 2, Funny

    who read the blurb and expected the printer to start printing out little cards reading "Teacher", "Doctor", "20,000", "100,000", etc? :)

  13. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf on Java by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Funny

    java is a worthless joke, a play-pretend half attempt at platform independence. there is no such thing as a java binary. java is not compiled. it is an interpreted language that runs specially compressed source code. there is no virtual machine. JRE is a glorified GWBASIC platform. java is the worst thing to happen to programming in ages.

    There is no such thing as bytecode. These "registers" are lies. There is no runtime stack. The javac executable is really a wrapper around gzip. This "JVM" is a fabrication concocted by the infidel authors of GWBASIC and does not exist. These cowards have no morals. I blame Al-Jazeera- they are marketing for Sun. God will roast their stomachs in hell. They are not in control of anything- they don't even control their own code! Be assured, our CPUs are safe and protected from compressed interpreted source code. We have placed their threads in a quagmire from which they can never emerge unless they throw an exception. Java is a snake and we will cut it in pieces!