ConwayLife.com

Hello everybody!

Six months ago I started a thread here about my project GarlicSim, and how it can be used for Life simulations. Calcyman raised the subject of giving arguments to the step function, and I made a new widget in GarlicSim 0.6 that makes it much easier.

To recap about GarlicSim: GarlicSim is a generic simulations framework. Here is its website:

http://garlicsim.org

I will not say more about it since you can read a lot of information on the website. (There is also a screenshot and a video there.)

In the last 5 months I've been working on GarlicSim 0.6, and yesterday I finally released it.

In this release I made a new widget called "Crunching" which allows giving different world laws to the simulation. It currently allows you to give different survival/birth numbers to the Life simulation.

Of course, it's still nowhere as mature or useful as Golly: The Life algorithm is slow (it's written in naive Python,) drawing is difficult, there's no zoom, no infinite board, etc. My plan is to lay down good groundwork for making such features easy to implement. A really polished version will be out by 2013.

So I hope you give it a try, and I'd love to hear feedback. What features are good? What is annoying? What features would you want me to add? Any other opinion and criticism will be appreciated.


If you want to give it a try, follow the installation instructions.


Best Wishes,
Ram Rachum.

I've like to give this another try, but it appears that easy_install is set on 0.5. Once this is updated, I'll install it and try again.

Axaj wrote:I've like to give this another try, but it appears that easy_install is set on 0.5. Once this is updated, I'll install it and try again.

What do you mean? You tried running `easy_install` and got version 0.5? I tested `easy_install` after I made the release and confirmed it installed 0.6. Perhaps you had 0.5 installed from before you ran `easy_install`?

cool-RR wrote:

Axaj wrote:I've like to give this another try, but it appears that easy_install is set on 0.5. Once this is updated, I'll install it and try again.

What do you mean? You tried running `easy_install` and got version 0.5? I tested `easy_install` after I made the release and confirmed it installed 0.6. Perhaps you had 0.5 installed from before you ran `easy_install`?

Hmm, I think I do have 0.5 installed, actually. In that case, how do I uninstall it?

Axaj wrote:

cool-RR wrote:

Axaj wrote:I've like to give this another try, but it appears that easy_install is set on 0.5. Once this is updated, I'll install it and try again.

What do you mean? You tried running `easy_install` and got version 0.5? I tested `easy_install` after I made the release and confirmed it installed 0.6. Perhaps you had 0.5 installed from before you ran `easy_install`?

Hmm, I think I do have 0.5 installed, actually. In that case, how do I uninstall it?

That's the main suckiness of `easy_install`, there's no command to uninstall. I apologize in behalf of the Python community. (Next time you can try to use `pip` instead, which does have an uninstall feature.)

You can manually uninstall though; Go to the c:\Python26\Lib\site-packages directory. Delete the `garlicsim` folder. Go to the `easy-install.pth` file and delete the line which has the entry for `garlicsim`. If you have `garlicsim_lib` and/or `garlicsim_wx` installed too, repeat the process again for these.

I think this should do it, let me know if there's a problem.

Again, I apologize, the lack of an uninstall option in `easy_install` is one of the shames of Python.

Unfortunately, I can't find the folder you specified, since I'm on a mac. Do you know where the folder is in there?

Axaj wrote:Unfortunately, I can't find the folder you specified, since I'm on a mac. Do you know where the folder is in there?

What you can do is open up a Python shell, run `import garlicsim`, then `garlicsim.__file__`. This will show you the path up to the `garlicsim` folder, which should contain the `site-packages` folder.

cool-RR wrote:Again, I apologize, the lack of an uninstall option in `easy_install` is one of the shames of Python.

Postscript: I recently made a small 0.6.1 release, and I now recommend `pip` as the installation manager instead of `easy_install`, partly because there is a `pip uninstall` feature for uninstalling packages, so next time you'll have an easier job uninstalling the previous GarlicSim version.