Yet another implementation of Conway's Game of Life.
Developed by John Horton Conway and first published in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, the Game of Life is a cellular automation that follows the following simple rules:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
- Any live cell with two or three neighbors remains alive.
- Any live cell with more than three neighbors dies.
- Any dead cell with exactly three neighbors becomes alive.
From those simple rules, a great amount of interesting complexity arises.
There isn't any profound reason behind this. Back in 2007, I started learning Python. I had just learned about the Game if Life a few years before, and it seemed like a good project to use to help me explore how to solve problems with the language. And, lo, life became the second project I ever wrote in Python.
It's now 2020, and I've spent a lot more time with the language. I thought it might be fun to go back and reimplement the first few things I wrote in Python to see what I would do differently. Not that this implementation is necessarily any better. Sometimes experience helps you avoid mistakes. Sometimes experience helps you make even bigger ones. But, if nothing else, at least I write unit tests now.
To run life, clone this repository to your local system and run the following from the repository:
python3 -m life
That assumes you have Python 3.10 or greater installed as python3.
When you first run life, you will see a title screen. At the bottom of the title screen, it says "Press any key to continue." Do so.
After you press any key, the text at the bottom of the screen will change to show you a list of commands. You press the key surrounded by parenthesis to use that command. For example, if you with to use the "(N)ext" command, press the 'n' key.
The initial commands available are:
- (A)utorun: automatically advance to the next generation until stopped.
- (C)lear: turn all live cells to dead cells.
- (E)dit: Enter edit mode, where you can manually set which cells are alive and dead.
- con(F)ig: Change configuration settings.
- (L)oad: load a saved pattern.
- (N)ext: advance to the next generation.
- (S)ave: save the current pattern.
- (Q)uit: quit this Game of Life.
To run the tests, clone this repository to your local system and run the following from the root of the repository:
python3 -m pytest
That assumes you have a fairly recent version of Python 3 available and it's at least aliased to python3.
The following features were added in the most recent release:
- Handle grids larger than the display area. (windowing)
- Terminate cells at the edge of the grid rather than letting them wrap.
- Allow wrap to be set as a command line argument.
- Allow rules to be set by command line argument.
- Load a file from command line argument.
- Implement configuration screen.
- In Load, allow pattern list to scroll.
- Set autorun rate.
- Move main to main.
- Allow editing movement by 10.
- Improve text entry when saving patterns.
- Manage different data entry types for configuration settings.
- Fix backspacing in text fields.
- Validate rules.
- Move clear to edit.
- Handle window movement.
- Set shape of grid from the command line.
- Move "exit" command to X from E.
- Display current generation number.
- Save as cells format.
- Read RLE files.
- Read/write metadata from/to files.
- Can change file format.
The following features are still planned to be implemented:
- Store user name in a configuration file.
- Look at more efficient algorithms for GoL. (bitpack?, striding?)
- Allow editing to increase and decrease brush size.
- Allow editing to place -ominos.
- Allow editing to place rotated -ominoes.
- Allow editing to place agars.
- Show previous generation as a different color.
- Download patterns from URLs.