This is a rough sketchpad of notes to help guide my thinking as I'm working through the Game of Life.
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Need to define what neighbors are
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Need to build a system that says neighbors are based on the active cell's x and y coordinates
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Should neighbors be a class (class Neighbors) that I can run an initializer on?
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I'm defining 1 as true, 0 as false
DON'T FEAR THE CODE. JUST WRITE STUFF.
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It's going to be positioned at the coordinates (4,5) - and we know that it has 1 neighbor. So at that point what do we need to do?
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We need to tell the cell to die - or give it a value of 0 in my case. I've already written these rules.
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So each cell knows what to do with itself now. But it's flat. It's a one-cell iteration.
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I need to be able to tell the game to start with a small grid. Start with a few x / y coordinates as a SEED.
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I need to be able to define neighbors based on their position in relation to the active cell. Do this with simple math based on the active cell's current x and y position.
Then I need to create a way for a cell to be able to look for its neighbors instead of depending on user input. Once it can look for its neighbors, then it can be self-sufficient. Each Cell.new can do it's own thing, and interact with all of the other Cell.new's. Do this by making Neighbors initialize with an array of information about the neighbors.
This is a test hash:
neighbor_scan = {[1,1] => 1, [1,0] => 0, [1,-1] => 0, [0,1] => 0, [0,-1] => 0, [-1,0] => 0, [-1,1] => 1, [-1,-1] => 1}
Look through the current value of each of the eight neighbor hashes. Add up the number of TRUE values. That sum is the current cell's neighbor count.
All of the data regarding whether a cell is dead or alive will be set to variables, right? So as the program progresses, it would set cell[4,5] == 0. At that point I could later ask cell[4,5] its value, and my active cell would know after searching that cell[4,5] == 0