Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 1, 2026

Golly (program)

Golly is a tool for the simulation of cellular automata. It is free open-source software written by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki; it can be scripted using Lua or Python. It includes a hashlife algorithm that can simulate the behavior of very large structured or repetitive patterns such as Paul Rendell's Life universal Turing machine, and that is fast enough to simulate some patterns for 232 or more time units. It also includes a large library of predefined patterns in Conway's Game of Life and other rules.

Last revised
Jun 1, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
248 w
Citations
8
Source
Wikipedia ↗
Golly
Initial releaseJuly 2005 (2005-07)1
Stable release
v5.0 / October 2025 (2025-10)1
Preview release
v5.0b1
Written inC++ (wxWidgets)
Operating systemLinux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, OS X, iOS, Android
LicenseGNU GPLv22
Websitegolly.sourceforge.io
Repositorysourceforge.net/projects/golly/

Golly is a tool for the simulation of cellular automata. It is free open-source software written by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki;3 it can be scripted using Lua1 or Python. It includes a hashlife algorithm that can simulate the behavior of very large structured or repetitive patterns such as Paul Rendell's Life universal Turing machine,4 and that is fast enough to simulate some patterns for 232 or more time units.5 It also includes a large library of predefined patterns in Conway's Game of Life and other rules.6

References

References

  1. "Golly Help: Changes". golly.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2016-10-02.
  2. "Golly download". sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2017-07-26.
  3. Delahaye, Jean-Paul (April 2009). "Le royaume du Jeu de la vie" (PDF). Pour la Science (in French): 86–91. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-06-14..
  4. Rendell, P. (2011). "A universal Turing machine in Conway's Game of Life". 2011 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS) (PDF). pp. 764–772. doi:10.1109/HPCSim.2011.5999906. S2CID 35957181. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-03-11. Retrieved 2012-12-09.
  5. Gotts, Nicholas M. (2009). "Ramifying feedback networks, cross-scale interactions, and emergent quasi individuals in Conway's Game of Life" (PDF). Artificial Life. 15 (3): 351–375. doi:10.1162/artl.2009.Gotts.009. PMID 19254180. S2CID 16527203..
  6. Eppstein, David (2010). "Growth and Decay in Life-Like Cellular Automata". In Andrew Adamatzky (ed.). Game of Life Cellular Automata. Springer. pp. 71–97. arXiv:0911.2890. Bibcode:2010golc.book...71E. doi:10.1007/978-1-84996-217-9_6. ISBN 9781849962179. S2CID 37007937.
External links