Game Of Life

About Game Of Life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.

The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

Rules:
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 neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

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.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_game_of_life

About this implementation:
This program was initially written to get acquainted with the android API. What is nicer then using such a beautiful mathematical object like this automaton. I took special care to implement this with tablets in mind.

The code is available under the GPL licence, see the github site ppareit/gameoflife.

Programming: Pieter Pareit
Artwork: Birgit Niemegeers