golly-test Mailing List for Golly

HI Nick,

You can also mail the golly-test list <gol...@li...>
which is full of friendly people who can help you. I've CC'd them because
someone can probably explain all this better than me.

It means 8^3 generations per step. Golly gets its speed from an algorithm
called hashlife - well worth looking into for ECE interest. With hashlife
it doesn't ever explicitly compute the intermediate steps - it just jumps
8^3 = 512 generations ahead directly.

Larger step sizes mean faster running, as long as the hash table fits in
memory. At some point (depends on the pattern and the memory available) it
typically slows down again. So there's often a sweet spot. For some
patterns, like Langtons Loops, the hash table never gets full, and you can
use hyperspeed to keep accelerating indefinitely. Other than those cases I
think you should have hyperspeed turned off.

One downside of hashlife is that it is hard to parallelize. So currently it
uses a single CPU.

Also, you don't need to set the minimum delay. That only affects the speed
when the steps goes below 8^0.

Regards,

Tim


On 7 June 2016 at 18:53, Nick Kyparissas <nic...@ho...> wrote:

> Dear Mr Hutton,
>
> my name is Nick Kyparissas and I am an undergraduate ECE student and a
> Cellular Automata enthusiast.
>
> I am sending you this email because I have some simple questions about
> Golly, and out of all the contributors you seemed the more appealing for me
> to send this message to. I haven't found any answers online, and I really
> hope I am not bothering you with this.
>
> I don't seem to grasp the idea of Golly's speed indicator. When we say
> that "step = 8^3" what does this mean..? Does it mean 8^3 generations per
> second..? Does it mean 8^3 clock cycles per generation..?
>
> And is Golly a good software for benchmarking my CPU's performance as far
> as CAs are concerned? Is there a way for me to make it use multiple cores
> of my processor? I use the 64 bit version of the program, and I have set my
> preferences:
>
>    - Hyperspeed is ON
>    - Minimum Delay: 0 (zero)
>    - Maximum Memory: 2048 MB
>
> Thank you very much for your time and for your incredible work with Golly.
>
> All the best,
>
> --
> Nick Kyparissas,
> Undergraduate Student,
> Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering
> Technical University of Cre...@ie... , nky...@ac.../~nkyparissas
>
>


-- 
Tim Hutton - http://www.sq3.org.uk - http://profiles.google.com/tim.hutton/ -
https://github.com/timhutton