The Game of Life (GoL) is a Cellular Automaton (CA) / 0 player game. That is a game that evolves from an initial state with no further interaction. GoL runs on a 2D grid of cells with 2 states, alive or dead. The cells evolve via the following rules:
- A cell with fewer than 2 neighbours dies from under population.
- A living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- A cell with more than 3 neighbours dies from over population.
- A dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours becoems alive in the next generation.
These rules can be simplified into:
- A living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours remains alive in the next generations.
- A dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours becomes alive in the next generation.
Similar CAs with evolutions relating to the the number of neighbours of a cell are called Life-like cellular automaton and are described by their rule which is denoted by a string "B/S".
For example GoL is described by the rule "B3/S23" which states a cell is Born if it has 3 neighbours and Survives if it has 2 or 3, altering those numbers yields other CAs with different behaviour. These are some examples taken from the wikipedia page for life-like CAs:
- "B3/S23" - The Game of Life
- "B36/23" - Highlife
- "B36/S125" - 2x2
- "B1357/S1357" - Replicator.
An interactive solution to the game of life using Golang and the Pixel 2D game library. Users can draw and erase cells, move the camera throughout the 2D world, import images and change the rules to play different life-like games.
- Interactive controls for starting, pausing, drawing and erasing cells, and resetting the game.
- Pan to view different parts of the grid.
- Toggleable grid information (frame rate, cell count, current generation).
- Add images turns pixels in PNG files into cells whenever the pixel color is not black or fully transparent.
- Change rules change the game rules to similar life-like games with "B/S" notation.
You can pass the following flags to the executable:
usage: Game-Of-Life-Go [<flags>]
Flags:
-w The width of the grid (default 2000)
-h The height of the grid (default 1500)
-s The scale of the cells (default 20)
-f Set the game FPS limit (default 20)
-p Add an image as "image_name.png" (default "")
-bs Select cellular automaton rules using the "B/S" notation (default "B3/S23")- Go: This project requires the Go programming language. You can download it from https://golang.org/dl/.
- Pixel Library: This project relies on the Pixel library for graphics. Install Pixel and its dependencies:
go get github.com/faiface/pixel go get github.com/faiface/pixel/pixelgl go get golang.org/x/image/colornames go get github.com/faiface/pixel/imdraw go get github.com/faiface/pixel/text go get golang.org/x/image/font/basicfont