Conway's Game of Life

Welcome to John Conway's "Game of Life"! This is a computer science classic from 1970, a program that simulates a cellular automaton (plural automata). It has connections to all kinds of different aspects of computer science and nature.

from Wikipedia

Rules

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

MVP Features

• Grid to display cells.
• Cell objects or components that, at a minimum, should have:
  • Properties
    • current state: (alive, dead), (black, white)
    • Clickable/Tappable:
      • can be clicked to allow user to setup initial cell configuration
      • should NOT be clickable while simulation is running
    • Behaviors
      • Toggle state functionality: switch between alive & dead either because user manually toggled cell before starting simulation or simulation is running and rules of life caused cell to change state
• An appropriate data structure to hold a grid of cells that is at least 25x25. Go as big as you want.
• Text to display current generation # being displayed
  • Utilize a timeout function to build the next generation of cells & update the display at the chosen time interval
• Button(s) that start & stop the animation
• Button to clear the grid

This algorithm:

• Implements the following basic steps:
  • For each cell in the current generation's grid:
    1. Examine state of all eight neighbors (it's up to you whether you want cells to wrap around the grid and consider cells on the other side or not)
    2. Apply rules of life to determine if this cell will change states
    3. When main loop completes:
       1. Swap current and next grids
       2. Repeat until simulation stopped

Custom Features

• A few sample cell configurations that users can load and run
• An option that creates a random cell configuration that users can run
• Additional cell properties, like color or size, and incorporate them into your visualization
• Allow users to specify the speed of the simulation
• Provide functionality to manually step through the simulation one generation at a time, as opposed to animating automatically
• Allow users to change the dimension of the grid being displayed
• App is deployed to a Vercel hosting service.