Life Battle

Paint red and blue armies or generate a start. Step first pauses playback, then advances exactly one generation. Restart returns to the latest starting pattern, established by applying settings, generating, clearing or completing an effective edit. Editing settings pauses and locks evolution and painting until Apply; resizing preserves the overlapping part of the board.

All cells update synchronously from their eight old Moore neighbours, excluding the centre. B digits specify birth counts and S digits survival counts. Wrapping connects opposite edges; the other boundary leaves the outside empty. Survivors keep their colour. Births inherit the majority neighbour colour. For equal colour counts, a fixed seed-and-cell priority selects one occupied parent. This choice does not depend on colour or generation. B0 is rejected because there is no parent colour.

After a generation, elimination ends play; if both colours disappear, the result is a draw. Otherwise, an exactly repeated coloured board after one or two steps is a coexistence draw. These conditions precede the generation limit, where current cell counts decide (equal counts draw). Longer periods are not detected. This tool’s even-birth extension and final-population score differ from classical Immigration games with odd birth counts and population-growth scoring. No general fairness, rotation or reflection symmetry is claimed.

Mirrored starts draw each left-half cell with the chosen density, paint it red and mirror it blue; an odd centre column remains empty. This guarantees equal initial counts and mirrored shapes only. Random starts use the density as total occupancy probability, split equally between the two colours. The same size, seed, density and mode reproduce the same start. Density edits affect only Generate start.

Choose View for touch scrolling, or a colour/Erase for drawing. Strokes commit on release; cancellation restores the board. Arrow keys move the cursor, Space paints with the selected brush, and Delete erases. Coordinates start at 1. Playback processes at most four generations per frame and reports discarded waiting time; it never skips a model generation.

Saved board and draft data use the existing 1,500-character encoded-state limit. A warning appears when saving is unavailable; the board remains usable in the current session. Reload restores a saved board as a paused generation-zero starting pattern, without the earlier history, outcome or timer.

References for B/S rules and the Moore neighbourhood: Golly QuickLife. Immigration conventions: Turney, Immigration Games (2020), p. 2.