Now that I've taken a more advanced course on Object-Oriented Design, I wanted to see how I would design my original solution differently to Problem 1 from this assignment from a previous course I took.
It models simple binary rule-based cellular automata, arranged in a line. The program starts with a single row of square cells whose states are either on or off. On every tick, a new row of children cells are generated from the previous row using a specified rule. Certain rules cause interesting patterns to emerge.
- uses JUnit instead of
tester.jar(testing library built by my professor) - uses Swing instead of
javalib.jar(image library built by my professor) - is now compartmentalized using MVC architecture
- drawing uses the adapter pattern
- a combination of a main class and a Controller do the job of the
CAWorld
- no longer having separate objects for
Cells with different rules:Rule30Cell,InertCell, etc objects don't take advantage of dynamic dispatch, which is one of the main advantages of representing types as objects. So for the sake of simplicity, I just let a cell's "rule" be a variable
This program uses the arguments that the main method receives as input (String[] args). Set up a run configuration that just contains the rule (a number) (in IntelliJ this is the box labeled "program arguments").
Interesting rules to use: 30, 54, 60, 182. Here's rule 182 in action:
