Conway’s Game of life

Description
  • Date: January 25, 2020
  • Categories: Content

The idea for this small project appeared while I was watching an interesting video on this great youtube channel called “Veritasium” and at one of the points of the video they talked about Conway’s Game of life, I remembered playing this game multiple times but I never actually took the time to learn about it, it’s a shame that the creator of the game “John Conway” as passed away due to covid-19, but I hope this project honors him, even thou he hated this game a bit because it was overshadowing other more important works of his life.

By the way, this is the video from Veritasium that I was talking about….

Amazingly, this game has only 4 simple rules and yet it’s able to distract me for minutes, but since it’s rather simple I decided to make it in android studio, so here are the rules:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.

After looking at the rules it’s easy to see that weed a bunch of if’s, for0s, and booleans for the cell status, we can easily replicate the game, I wont go to detail in this post but if you wish to see the code, you can download it here:

Conway’s Game of life google drive folder