Many, many years ago I tried to learn Java. I didn’t get very far but one of the things I built was The Game of Life.
Unfortunately I can not find the code I wrote, probably a good things as it is probably amusingly bad.
Now you are probably asking what is the Game of Life? The game of life, sometimes called cellular automation, is a simulation of cells being born and dying. It is sometimes called Conway’s Game of Life after the British mathematician who devised it in 1970.
The game has several rules:
- Any cell with less than three neighbours will die on the next turn
- Any cell with three neighbours lives on to the next turn
- Any cell with more than three neighbours will die on the next turn
- Any dead cell with three live neighbours will be born on the next turn
Now I had not thought about this game until the other day when I came across a blog and a github page which sparked my interest again. This version is written in javascript, but the blog mentions a desire to build this program in many different languages. I want to build this with visual studio in C# as it should provide a good training exercise.
There are several problems I need to overcome to achieve this, I am currently trying to work out how to “draw” the cells. My current thinking is that maybe I can code it using characters to display the cells and then replace with pixels once I have the logic correct. Well lots for me to learn!
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