A pygame visualisation of the Game of Life by John Conway

Conway's Game of Life is a 0 player game consisting of a grid of cells and a set of rules that governs the cells. Rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
• 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 overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

These rules can then be condensed into the following:

• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.
• Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
• All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.

Lastly, after establishing the rules, you can choose a starting generation of live cells in a particular pattern then observe the changes over generations caused by the rules.

This repository contains code that simulates the game of life with the help of a starting generation text file.

A screenshot of a puffer-type breeder (red) that leaves glider guns (green) in its wake, which in turn create gliders (blue).

After working on this, I wanted to adapt the game of life to create something that would continue to expand while also being able to change colour so I created a version 2.

For this the rules are tweaked such that it is easier for a cell to multiply than to die, furthermore I added a colour change system to each cell that depended on the age of the cell (how many generations/frames it is consecutively), leading to this: