John Conway's Game of Life

steve's picture
Submitted by steve on Mon, 05/04/2009 - 08:40

This is another little doo-dad that's been in my arsenal for a while now. I originally developed this to be used as a forum avatar and possibly figure out the real meaning of life. I'm still waiting for the riches.

John Conway's Game of Life used to be my screensaver on all my Solaris boxes when I was a Solaris admin. I was facinated by it then and was feeling a little nerdy and nostalgic, so I spent an afternoon to read up on it and develop this.

It comes in two versions. First, the drupal module that you see on the main page, and then a second standalone version.

The standalone version has an extra feature that doesn't really make sense for a drupal module. It will automatically compiling an animated GIF version of all the generations that have happened since the last reset. Append "?anim=1" to the URL to see it. Also for the standalone version, append "?reset=1" to reset the world. To change the colors, edit the index.php file and change the $bg, $fg, $txt_bg and $txt_fg variables (the source is documented in this respect).

Update - This has been accepted as a contributed Drupal module! You can get the latest release for the Drupal module on its project page here: http://drupal.org/project/conwayslife . The standalone version is still available below.

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life.tar_.gz
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