09 August 2011

Conway's Game of Life in Java!!

I recently met with Conway's Game of Life problem given as a programming assignment by one of the famous MNCs to clear level 1 in interview process. It was so mouth watering that I want to develop an UI for it and publish it in my blog. Spent 3 hours and came up with this.

Quick gist about the game from wikipedia
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Following is the screenshot and an applet for the same. The Code is free to share and distribute. Visit my github link for this game for the bleeding edge copy.







Cheers!!
Braga

1 comment:

wingi said...

There is a little code puzzle on snowisfalling.com - follow the instruction in the page source. And then see my solution as conways game of live on united-coders.com