The Game of life is a zero player game developed in the 70s by John Horton Conway. The evolving state of the game is determined by the initial configuration, according to a defined set of behaviour rules (see Rules below). Some configurations become infinitely evolving constellations, others eventually evolve into a stable patterns, whilst others die off completely.
- Clone the repo to your local device, using
git clone https://github.com/TimRobinson1/Game-of-Life.git - Naviate into the repo using
cd game-of-life - Install the gem dependencies by running
bundle install - Run
rspecandrubocopto ensure the program is running successfully. - Finally, if you wish to set off and start a new game, run
rackup - Navigate in your browser of choice to
http://localhost:9292/- and enjoy!
- The game evolves in turns, or 'ticks'
- All changes occur at the same time.
- Any live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours survives until next tick.
- Any live cell with less than 2 live neighbours dies (underpopulation).
- Any live cell with more than 3 live neighbours dies (overpopulation).
- Any dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours becomes a live cell (reproduction).
A grid following these rules, and given the right starting configuration, has the ability to produce something that looks like this:
- Ruby
- RSpec
- SimpleCov
- Rubocop
- Sinatra (for web-display purposes)
My first instinct when approaching this test was to create a Game class, a Board class and a class for each Cell. As a starting point, I began working with an array of arrays as the layout for my grid, which contained either a 0 or a 1 at each index. 1 was represented a live cell, and 0 represented a dead cell.
Once I had established a bare working version, I decided to start again with Cell classes in place of the 1s and 0s, now that I was comfortable with how the logic would work.
After spending some time rebuilding the program, it felt as though my program was now doing more work for the same results that it was arriving at previously. Having a grid of 1s and 0s also made for much more readable tests, as the expected output could clearly be demonstrated.
It was at this point I returned to using 1s and 0s, and extracted the cell scanning logic to a separate CellScanner class. Finally, as a last step after crafting the program successfully, I implemented a very basic sinatra app to display the game, in case anyone was interested to run it themselves.