I developed this program to understand how animation and graphic-like abilities were achieved in the era of command-line interfaces. The program simulates the two most popular cellular automata: Conway's Game of Life and Wolfram's Elementary Cellular Automata.
The screenshot below of the program running on Turbo C++ IDE is showing a generation from Conway's Game of Life. This particular pattern is known as the Gosper's Glider Gun as it creates patterns akin to a shooting gun.
This program can also simulate Wolfram's Elementary Cellular Automaton. The screenshot below depicts the pattern from Rule 18 which generates an increasingly-bigger Sierpinski's Triangle.
This program is designed to run on TurboC++ compiler and has been tested to run successfully on compiler version 3.2. Download the Turbo C++ compiler from its website.
Then, move the file AUTOMATA.CPP inside the bin folder located in the Turbo C++ directory, which is by default in C: for Windows users. The program can then be opened and run inside the Turbo C++ IDE.
The algorithm implemented to achieve animation re-prints the entire screen for each generation. Some of the challenges we overcome in this project are:
- Turning rectangle MS-DOX "grids" into a square grid.
- Matrix operations
- Window-like user interface in a command-line environment