gol

about

an implementation of conway’s game of life that runs in the terminal.

gol features a resizable map, scalable random population distributions, using an input file to generate a map, and runs in both unicode and ascii modes.

running gol results in a series of iterations on a map of cells marked ‘dead’ or ‘alive’. for each iteration, each cell looks at the status of the neighboring cells. if the cell is already alive, it stays alive if 2 or 3 neighboring cells are alive, otherwise it dies. a dead cell is brought to life if it is surrounded by exactly 3 live cells. each iteration uses the last iteration as it’s input to determine the next board.

### X - current cell
#X# # - neighboring cell
###

example step (o = alive, . = dead):

o.o      .oo
.oo  =>  o.o
oo.      ooo