3D Pinball Space vs Gosper

The table features the player as a member of a space fleet that completes missions to increase rank. Players can attain nine different ranks (listed from lowest to highest): Cadet, Ensign, Lieutenant, Captain, LT Commander, Commander, Commodore, Admiral, and Fleet Admiral. Players accept a mission by hitting "mission targets" which select which mission they will take, and by going up the "launch ramp". Each mission has a set number of things for players to do, such as hitting the "attack bumpers" (which are a set of four bumpers at the top of the table) eight times (this is the "target practice" mission). Some missions involve a number of steps which must be completed in sequence. Missions end either by being completed, or by being aborted due to running out of "fuel", as indicated by the lights in the passage that passes under the launch ramp. The "fuel" lights go out one by one at a time interval, and can be re-lit by having the ball go over them, or all at once by going up the launch ramp again. Upon completing a mission, some of the blue lights in a circle in the middle of the table turn on. When all of the lights in the blue circle turn on, the player's rank increases, and a light in the orange circle turns on.

In 1970, a mathematician named John Conway wrote three rules on a board: a cell with fewer than two neighbours dies of loneliness, one with more than three dies of crowding, and in an empty space with exactly three neighbours, a new cell is born. That is all. There are no other rules. And out of those three sentences come ships that cross the screen, guns that fire forever, clocks that beat in exact time, and structures that copy themselves. Nobody programmed them: they were in the rules all along. Gosper is a place to watch it happen. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Draw with your finger and press play. Zoom in, zoom out, change the speed, step one generation at a time. • Drop machines from the library: forty historical patterns, each with who discovered it, in what year, and what it does. Nothing invented — every one is checked by a test that verifies its period. • Change the rules. Besides Conway's original there are seven more: HighLife, which replicates itself; Seeds, which explodes; Day & Night, which is symmetric. • Save your universes and come back to them. • Share them with the community, and bring home other people's. • Duel against the machine. Two gardens side by side: you throw machines into its garden, it throws them into yours, and you win by leaving its garden with less than a quarter standing. Build your own deck from the library, from patterns you cut out of your own universe, or from the community. WHY IT IS FAST The engine is written in C++ and computes in blocks of bits, not cell by cell. A universe of a million cells runs at sixty frames per second on an iPhone. Cost depends on what is happening, not on the size of the world: a huge, nearly empty universe costs nothing. NO ADS, NO SUBSCRIPTION No advertising, no analytics, no user profiling. Gosper Pro is a single optional purchase that adds five more themes, giant universes and unlimited saves. Nothing that is free gets cut back to push you into paying. EIGHT THEMES Neon on black, ink on paper, pure black and white, mossy greens, magma, ocean, the amber phosphor of an old monitor, and pastels. The name is for Bill Gosper, who in 1970 built the first glider gun and won the fifty dollars Conway offered to anyone who could prove such a thing could grow forever. That gun is still firing inside this app.