It is a program that simulates a living group of cells in two-dimensional laboratory. The grid's size is adjustable by user. Every cell can be in one of two states - alive (indicated by 'o') or dead (indicated by ' '). All of them are identical and run by the same rules, previously stated. At first, living cells are distributed randomly in the laboratory while probability that the cell is alive at the beginning is adjustable by player.
- A living cell with only 0 or 1 living neighbours dies from isolation.
- A living cell with 4 or more living neighbours dies from overcrowding.
- A dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbours becomes alive.
- All other cells remain unchanged.
These rules influence whether the cell will be alive in next generation or not.They are applied to all cells simultaneously. Every such application is called a generation.
After seeing the first generation player decides after how many more generations they'd like to see the lab again. All the decisions together with outcomes - first and last generation - is stored in output file.
To implement working program I decided to use pointers to be able to change dynamically allocated two-dimensional arrays in functions outside main(). Moreover, I decided to use pseudo-random number generator to initialize the starting laboratory. It doesn't make the solution less equal as the other variables given by user change the grid more drastically. All of the data given by user and generated by program is saved in output file.
You can download the program here.
The actual version of the program is marked as Latest release.
To download the code, click Source code (zip) or Source code (tar.gz) and save it on your computer.
To download the executable file, click conway-game-of-life.exe and save it on your computer. The output file storing the parameters given by the player and the laboratories will be created in the same folder as saved .exe file.