Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton that is played on a 2D square grid. Each square (or "cell") on the grid can be either alive or dead, and they evolve according to the following rules:

• Underpopulation: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
• Overpopulation: Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
• Static: Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation.
• Birth: Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.

The initial configuration of cells can be created by a human, but all generations thereafter are completely determined by the above rules. The goal of the game is to find patterns that evolve in interesting ways – something that people have now been doing for over 50 years.

Proposed implementation uses Python3 to provide a simulation of Conway's Game of Life in Linux terminal

Till this moment only an AUR package is avalaible. In future will be provided packages for more distibutions

yay -S game-of-life-cli

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/DdimaPos/game-of-life-cli.git

Change into the directory:

cd game-of-life-cli

Make the script executable:

chmod +x gol-cli.py

Move the script to a directory in your PATH:

sudo mv gol-cli.py /usr/local/bin/game-of-life-cli

Ensure dependencies are installed:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-numpy  # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install python3 python3-numpy     # Fedora
sudo pacman -S python python-numpy         # Arch Linux

Delete the directory with the cloned repository

Run CLI script with this command

game-of-life-cli

Eg: game-of-life-cli -d true or game-of-life-cli --divided false

Eg: game-of-life-cli -t 0.2 or game-of-life-cli --time 0.2

Eg: game-of-life-cli -c cyan or game-of-life-cli --color cyan

Eg: game-of-life-cli -p 0.3 or game-of-life-cli --probability 0.3

You can combine the parameters to get something pleasing to your eyes

In addition there are added some features to let the user enjoy the evolution without involving in process:

1. Restarting the simulation when it reaches it's stability - After a certain amount of time 2 generations start to repeat. When this happens simulation restarts
2. Wrapping from boundaries - to increse the lifetime of simuation the cells at the boundaries treat as their neighbors cells from opposite boundaries