The Game of Life is a program created by John Conway back in the 1970s ish… In this program, cells can live or die depending on binary, true/false statements. In Conway’s code each cell had neighbors. The number of neighbors each cell possessed during one sequence determined if that cell would live, die, or reproduce in the next sequence. The program would repeat itself (recursion) until there were only still life clusters of cells left. These were cells who had the correct amount of neighbors to live, but not the correct amount to reproduce.
(Sorry for this poor explanation… here is a gif to make up for it)
(jk… here is an image)
The Game of Life has been re-created a countless number of times using various programming languages. I believe this is because it is such a straight forward visual example of what programming does. Everything is apparent, an abstraction of an abstraction if you will…
After working with Python for a few hours, I gained the confidence to try and create my own game of life via python. However, the software did not get along with my computer. So I had to stick to JavaScript. Below are a few frames from my game of life program. Instead of using squares to represent the cells, I used lines to show how the code can be manipulated.
Here is a link to the Game of Life Wikipedia page for general info.
Okay so the gif does not show up on the blog post, but the link works if you want to check it out…