This project is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life (or Life for short) in Structured Query Language (SQL). No procedural extension to SQL is used.
For information about the game, see About Life. For information about the creator of the game, see About John Conway.
The following is a set of recommended directions for running the project. Note that these directions assume an SQLite3
binary exists and is associated with the shell command sqlite3. The project was developed and tested with version 3.32.3
of SQLite. Compatibility with previous versions may exist but is not guaranteed.
- Start a shell session and navigate to the root directory of the project/cloned repo
- Run the command
sqlite3 life.db '.read setup.sql'to randomly generate an initial state - Run the command
sqlite3 life.db '.read play.sql'to first render the state and then update the state
Re-run play.sql using the above method as many times as you desire to render and update the state. Since no procedural
extension of SQL was used, there is no animation loop, and so the user must render and advance the state manually.
This section assumes basic familiarity with Life. If you are not familiar with Life but want to read this section, please read the section About Life, or consult a source like Wikipedia on the game.
All source files are well-documented, so explanations of or details about these files will not be supplied here. This project is largely an exploratory proof-of-concept, and SQL is not well-suited to implementing Life for various reasons. As such, the documentation in most scripts has a section called Additional Notes. These sections contain detailed explanations of each script at a level of detail that would generally not be supplied.
Common implementations of Life represent the state of a world as a 2D list of bits or booleans. Typically a live cell is truthy while a dead cell is falsy. While this approach is intuitive, dead calls don't need to be stored, and doing so can have costs in terms of memory and storage.
An alternative approach is to store only the coordinates of live cells, requiring less memory and storage.
This implementation uses a toroidal grid. As such, objects that leave the screen on one edge will re-enter the screen with the same trajectory and velocity at the equivalent location on the opposing edge.