An implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life
Explanation
The Game of Life works by having a grid of cells where each cell is in one of two states: alive or dead. The simulation progresses iteratively where each new generation is defined by the previous; a live cell survives to the next iteration only if it has two living neighbours, otherwise it will become a dead cell. A dead cell will become alive only if there are exactly 3 living neighbours. This simple set of rules can result in some interesting behaviour, including that the system is Turing-complete, or in other words it can be programmed to perform data-manipulation. However, that behaviour is outside of the scope of my interest in this project.
Tools
For this project I chose to use Java with Swing. At the time I was in the process of learning Java, and this seemed like an appropriate challenge. My other choices were C# using Windows Forms or Python. C# was a poor choice since I wanted my program to be easily cross-platform (the UI wouldn’t work non-Windows OSes) and I didn’t have enough experience with Python GUI libraries.
Gallery
