2021-08-12

Conway's Game of Life

Replication, evolution, and pattern formation. Three beautiful aspects of life come together in this simple but intriguing zero-player game designed by British mathematician Jone Horton Conway. Many people I know mentioned that the beauty of this very game played important role that drove them into biophysics, computational biology or other related topics. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.

In this small weekend project, I implement this game of life into a web app. You can either start with a random board, or clear the board and draw whatever pattern you like, or just choose one of the interesting patterns from the library, and just watch how they evolve, how patterns start forming, and how the life being fundamentally unpredictable.

Read more about Conway's Game of Life on wikipedia
And start playing at gameoflife.xinshi.me

If you are into web development, check out the code here

Tools that are used in this small project: Typescript; Reactjs; chakra-ui/react The board is rendered as divs (instead of canvas in the A* Snake game)