👾 conway

Conway is a terminal implementation of Conway's Game of Life ("GoL") that uses the contents of arbitrary files as the initial state.

conway README.md

Each byte is expanded into eight bits, with each bit corresponding to a cell in the initial grid. The simulation then evolves according to the standard GoL rules.

file -> bytes -> bits -> cell -> generations

Installation

Install directly from the repo

cargo install --git https://github.com/punctuations/conway

Or build locally

git clone https://github.com/punctuations/conway
cd conway
cargo build --release

# Install to PATH
cargo install --path .

Usage

conway <file>

Any file can be used as input

• conway README.md
• conway image.png
• conway /usr/bin/ls
• which ls | conway
• cat "Hello world!" | conway

The initial state is deterministic.

How it works

The input file is read as raw byte stream and converted to a bit stream.

For example: 0xA6 -> 10100110

The bit stream is mapped row-major onto the simulation grid. Then grid is then updated using Conway's GoL rules.

The terminal size determines the visible portion of the grid.