[Are we alone...]

I was thinking of similarities between them, rather than requirements for a definition, so I agree that they're not properties shared by all life.

The third, I'm not sure what you mean by a river that needs minerals to grow : In fact, there must not be mineral so the river can expand as it "wants" to...

Maybe 'minerals' isn't the right word, but rivers take in sediment from the land they pass over and then deposit it downstream; the river channel grows as it erodes the land, and at a delta the river is expanding by redistributing the sediment that it has collected. And at meanders the river reshapes itself by eroding some parts of its bank and depositing at other parts (I remember far too much from geography lessons :-() - although that doesn't seem to have any analogies in life. (Possibly because most life has to struggle to exist, and can't afford to waste its energy.)

1. Every thing that can create, sustain and repair by itself and, if needed, to replicate itself, however the means are.

A river does not sustain by itself : Rain must be

No living organisms sustain themselves - they all rely on their environment for energy, or for chemicals that can release energy. At the lowest level, all the energy comes from the Sun, and nothing could continue living for long without that continual input. (And the rivers would also stop flowing, since all the water would freeze).

The idea that a living organism can create things in its own image (basically reproduction) sounds like a valid one; some animals (like mules) can't, but it's easy to ignore a few exceptions

Crystals have a similar property - stick a crystal in an appropriate liquid and it'll grow more crystals - but I'm not aware of them being able to repair their structure, so your definition probably excludes them.

I don't think a perfect definition is possible - humans have decided whether things are alive based on feelings rather than strict logic, so logic will never perfectly fit - but your proposal does seem to generally work, and I can't think of anything much better

[Are we alone...]

If there was 'life', would we even recognise it? We can instinctively tell whether something on Earth is alive or not -- but why is a tree alive when a river isn't? They both come into existence and then disappear, both need water to continue existing, both collect minerals from around them to help them grow, both support other lifeforms. If we discovered things elsewhere in the universe that have those properties, would we call them alive or not?

And that's not even considering the problem of where the limits of 'intelligent' are

[Coding Contest - acceptor merging]

Just because it's a perfect opportunity to use Quantum::Superpositions, a Perl solution to generating all combinations:

use Quantum::Superpositions;

$values .= any($_, '') for 1..4;
print join "\n",  sort sensibly  grep length > 1,  eigenstates $values;

sub sensibly { length $a <=> length $b or $a <=> $b } # only needed if you care about the output order

(But I don't understand the part about calculating values for each combination of indices :-()

[Ykkrosh does it again!]

I did the SWGB mod programs in [not-particularly-advanced] VB (easy to make nice windows, hard to make nice resizing or dynamically-generated windows); the original GeniEd in Perl with a console-based UI (only slightly better than a command-line interface); the AOM file-converter in Perl/Tk (didn't need a particularly complicated interface since it was just a few buttons and file dialogs, but the code was still quite ugly); and GeniEd2 in C++ with wxWindows, which seems to solve all the problems I had with the other methods (although it probably adds all new problems which I just haven't noticed yet ).

And it's easy to embed C++ code in C++ programs, unlike in other languages (the SWGB tools take forever to decompress SLPs and AOMEd has the most unbelievably pathetic (and still extremely slow) palettisation code), so it's now my language of choice until something better comes along

[What's the worst error you can get?]

This

[Ykkrosh does it again!]

I'm not sure if it would be of any use to you, but I have the old source code for Mod Pack Studio v3 that never came out.

I don't know much about MPS, but it sounds like the only particularly interesting part of MPS3 is terrain editing, which isn't hugely interesting - not enough to make me happy about touching VB again :-( (Although it's quite probable that I'm unaware of what MPS3 can actually do that nothing else can.)

There might be some potential for boredom in the near future (four months of holiday left! yay!) -- I don't want to commit myself to anything long-term, but I'd be happy to help out if there's something simple enough

[Ykkrosh does it again!]

Hehehe..... I wonder what took so long for the Stat Editor to be implemented into AoK if SWGB used the same engine.....

The original (and slow and ugly) GeniEd tried to understand the entire genie.dat file from SWGB, and there were too many differences in AoK's empires2.dat for me to bother doing it.

GeniEd2 is much simpler since it only tries to handle the unit data, so reading AoK's slightly different format wasn't particularly hard. And being a complete rewrite, it's far less horribly slow and ugly than the original