Game of Life example

This is an example implementation of the Conway's Game of Life.

The main purpose of this code is illustration of a good object-oriented design. The code is organized as follows:

• life.py is the main file to run. It reads the game parameters from the command line (see below) and creates Board and Display class instances.
• model.py holds the Board class that is responsible for game logic (model).
• view_mpl.py and view_pygame.py are hold classes responsible for display of the board and user interaction (views). They use different engines to demonstrate that the good code organization allows to easily change the engine. Only one of these files is imported, depending on the parameters.
• All the *.txt files contain sample patterns.

Running the program

Open the command line console and type

python life.py [OPTIONS]

where [OPTIONS] are optional arguments and can be:

• -h or --help show help message and exit,
• -r RULE or --rule RULE game rule (see below),
• -b WIDTH HEIGHT or --board WIDTH HEIGHT size of the board,
• -p PATTERN or --pattern PATTERN filename of the pattern,
• -d DENSITY or --density DENSITY density of live cells in a random board,
• -s STEPS or --steps STEPS number of color steps showing cell age,
• -f FPS or --fps FPS number of animation frames per second,
• -c COLORMAP or --colormap COLORMAP display color map,
• -v ENGINE or --view ENGINE view engine (can be mpl or pg2, pg3, or gl),
• -F or --fullscreen start in fullscreen mode.

Other interesting rules

The default Game of life rule set is B3/S23, which means that a new cell is born if it has exactly 3 neighbors and any alive cell survives only if it has 2 or 3 neighbors. However, different rules are possible. Some particularly interesting behaviors are summarized below:

Rule	Description
B45678/S2345	walled cities
B345/S4567	diamond shape patterns