Game of Life

An elixir implementation of Conway's game of life

Introduction

Game of life is a zero player game which has four rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by over-population.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Given these simple rules, a cell world will automatically evolve to a different world, and sometimes some life behaviours are shown, such as repeat, moving. This phenomena make it a fascinating game from a observer's perspective.

Why choose elixir

I had chosen elixir to write this game mainly for purpose of learning this new language. But from some point of view it's a very good fit for this game:

• The game is all about data transition, in a massive scale where parallism can go pretty useful
• The elixir lang's pipe operator(|>) make the process very beautiful
• The elixir lang enforced the separation of concerns which make it natural to get Engine/WebUI out of surface
• The required supervision tree design phase make this game very stable

How to run this game

Using Docker

• docker run -d -p 4000:4000 benb88/game_of_life
• open Demo page to view the game

Manual

• Install Elixir
• Install Nodejs
• mix deps.get
• mix phoenix.server
• open Demo page to view the game