Life

Conway's Game of Life visualizer tool built with Elixir and Scenic.

Sample

Flyer Generator

Pulsar Oscillator

Explanation

In the Game of Life, a board has cells that are either alive or dead. Given a set of rules, the board will change. All changes for a given iteration/tick happen simultaneously on the previous board status. This means that any changes to the cells during the current iteration will not influence the other cells.

Rules

The rules of Conway's Game of Life are very simple,

1. any live cell with two or three live neighbors remain alive,
2. any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies (simulating underpopulation),
3. any live cell with greater than three live neighbors dies (simulating overpopulation),
4. any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors become a live cell (simulating reproduction)

Using the visulizer

Important Unfortunately, due to limitations of Scenic, the visualizer can only run on Mac OS and Linux.

Ensure that Elixir and any dependency of Scenic is installed.

git clone https://github.com/woojiahao/life.git
cd life/
mix deps.get
mix scenic.run

Select the cells to set them as alive/dead before running.

Configuration

You can configure the board size and initial pattern by editing the config/attrs.exs file, under the :attrs config.

import Config

# Configure here
config :life, :attrs, %{
  cell_size: 20,
  evolution_rate: 100,
  pattern: :empty
}

1. cell_size -- size of each cell displayed
2. evolution_rate -- speed each iteration occurs, measured in milliseconds
3. pattern -- some default oscillating patterns to get started, includes :blinker, :beacon, :pulsar, :toad, :empty