Game Of Life

• Academic year: 2020-2021
• Project title: Game of Life
• Student: Abdullah Chaudhry
• CFUs: 9

About Game of Life

The game of life is a cellular automaton imagined by John H. Conway in the 1970s and is probably, the best known of all cellular automata. Despite very simple rules, the game of life is Turing-complete and deterministic. The game of life is a game in the mathematical sense rather than a playable game. It is “zero player game”.

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Rules

The game takes place on a two-dimensional finite or infinite grid whose cells can take two distinct states: “alive” or “dead”. At each stage, the evolution of a cell is entirely determined by its current state and the state of its eight neighbours as follows:

1. A dead cell with exactly three living neighbours becomes alive.
2. A living cell with two or three living neighbours remains alive.
3. In all other cases, the cell becomes (or remains) dead.

Implementation

The game was implemnted using Python and PyQt5 for the GUI. The main feature have been written in the Grid class (grid.py) which represents the model of the MOV design pattern, in fact it provides methods to the controller (GoL class in main.py) in order to change the state of the game.

Functionality

The user can play, pause and reset the game using the buttons at the top of the window. The speed of the game can be changed at any time using a slider.

Cell history

The animation of the Game of Life simulation keep track of how long each cell has been alive. Each cell remembers for how long it has been occupied and changes accordingly the color from light blue (newborn) to bright red (ancient).

Requirements

PyQt5

$ pip install PyQt5

Running the game

The game can be launched from the main.py script:

$ python3 main.py

Acknowledgments

Human Computer Interaction Programming Assignment - Computer Engineering Master Degree @University of Florence