A base repository for pairing interviews based on the excellent Code Retreat format
This is cribbed from the Code Retreat description:
Conway's 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.
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, but in this case we can simplify it to a fixed size grid. Each cell is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its neighbors, it can have up to 8, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent, if they exist. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation can be passed in as an initial state and following generations are created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the grid. Births and deaths happen 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 one before). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.
Implement the Game of Life. When implementing the Game of Life in an interview please emphasize code quality, testing and please articulate your thinking as you go.
This is a pairing exercise so your interviewee is your pair - treat them as such. Ask questions. Bounce ideas off of them, etc.
After NPM installing, the tests can be run using node test.js.
Based on @daveworth's excellent Game Of Life Pairing.