Conway’s game of life is probably the most popular cellular automaton. I’ve known it for a long time, but until now I never really tried to implement it.
The idea is to construct a grid with each position representing a cell that can be alive or dead. We then apply a set of rules to each cell in the grid to obtain the next generation of cells in a new grid. The set of rules is applied as a Pure function to the grid.
The game has the following set of rules to dictate whether a cell lives or dies:
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell in the next generation
- Any other cell becomes a dead cell in the next generation
My first implementation of Conway’s game of life was in Rust, displaying the cells in the terminal as Unicode characters using the crossterm library to manipulate the terminal.