Description

Game of Life is a cellular automation devised by John Conway in 1970. My application puts the game on screen as a Windows Form application. It was written in C++ for a first-year university assignment. The application uses the standard rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Development

GeeksforGeeks has a great tutorial which explains how you could code this application in a variety of languages. I based my code on this and added functions for loading from and saving to a CSV file. There are a few important things to consider:

• Saving the future state of the grid in a separate array before overwriting the current one prevents destructive mutations (I learned this one the hard way!).
• A discrete function for counting neighbours for a given cell simplifies the main loop.
• In the original simulation, the edges of the grid do not wrap. I chose to wrap the edges so that simple starting states last longer or even indefinitely.

int countNeighbours(bool boolArray[][gridSize], int x, int y) {
	int count = 0;
	for (int i(-1); i < 2; ++i) { //for every row before and after the passed position
		for (int j(-1); j < 2; ++j) { //for every column before and after the passed position
			int checkX = x + i;
			int checkY = y + j;

			//edge cases - wrap coordinates around the grid
			if (checkX < 0) {
				checkX = gridSize-1;
			}
			else if (checkX >= gridSize) {
				checkX = 0;
			}

			if (checkY < 0) {
				checkY = gridSize-1;
			}
			else if (checkY >= gridSize) {
				checkY = 0;
			}
			//add to neighbours if not checking self and checked cell is true (alive)
			if ( !(i == 0 && j == 0) && (boolArray[checkX][checkY] == true)) {
				++count;
			}
		}
	}
	return count;
}

When the project was first set there was no requirement for a GUI, so I output the simulation in the terminal.

Features

• Interactive GUI, step through iterations manually or automatically
• Pre-made patterns, glider and 10 cell row
• Toggle the state of any cell by clicking on it
• Load/save the current state to CSV
• Wrap grid edges
• Change cell color
• Compile the application with different grid sizes

This video has no sound