Observe Conway's Game of Life through a terminal window.
Life -- or the Game of Life -- is a zero-player game designed by John Conway; that is, it isn't so much played as it is observed.
The rules of the game along with its initial state dictate its evolution.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.
- Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
- All other cells remain unchanged.
In this implementation, the initial state can be customized using the -c
flag. The user is then presented an unpopulated grid with the ability to toggle
the state of any cell with a mouse click. Without customization, it plants a
glider in the center
of the grid. A glider is a particular figure that moves across the game's grid.
It is also the smallest spaceship, which is any group of live cells that
present a pattern after a given number of iterations.
This implementation of Conway's Game of Life depends on ncurses, the C standard library, and POSIX.
Run the build script without any arguments to create an executable.
$ ./scripts/build.sh
$ ./life
Call the executable with the following options to change the extraneous behavior of the game.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-c |
Configure the initial state of the game |
-d |
Set the number of seconds between each iteration |
-i |
Set the total number of iterations before exit |