Low Budget Code Project 00: Conway’s Game Of Life
Howdy folks. Welcome to your first low budget code project. We’ll be creating Conway’s Game Of Life using the rules established by Coderetreat. What makes this project great?
- You can do this project in less than an hour
- You can focus on learning a specific skill
- Once you’re done, you’re done
- You can do this project again and again
Our goal is to create Conway’s Game Of Life in 45 minutes. Once you hit the 45 minute mark you erase your code. That’s right, you toss it. Your main goal isn’t to focus on the final product; A true example of focusing on the journey over the destination.
What is Conway’s Game Of Life?
Conway’s Game Of Life is a zero-player game played on an N x N grid. Each of the cells in the grid is considered to be alive or dead. Each of the cells are reviewed and updated at the same time. Every update creates a new generation, the state of the board at a particular time. The board gets updated forever creating an infinite amount of generations. The state of a cell on the board is determined by four rules:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell
Where do I start?
| Goal | Suggestions on how | Goes Well With |
|---|---|---|
| Learn a new language | Do the project in a new language, and don’t care if you finish | Bedhead |
| Learn the latest JavaScript Framework | Create your project in Angular / Ember / React | Too Many Cooks (I know, not a short, but it feels appropriate) |
| Get better at data structures | Try different ways to store your grid (One dimensional array, Two dimensional array, Hash table ) | Frankenweenie |
| Learn about functional programing | Do it in Haskell | Luxo Jr. |
Get Coding
My Finished Product
I went over the 45 minute period to tweak my output. I decided to go with a simple text representation so I wouldn’t have to worry about rendering graphics. I hit a few stumbling points when it came to checking neighbors. I was getting “Out of bounds” exceptions when I checked any cell on the outer parameter. My other big take away was I probably should have came up with a better way to find a cell’s neighbors. I ended up with 8 methods to get the cells neighbors. I probably should of had one with the displacement from the original cell. I could probably include one set of logic to make sure I am in bounds. I’ll try that the next time.