Inspiration
Back in college, for my NEA (Non-Exam Assessment) I was researching ideas that I can base my project on and stumbled across John Conway's Game of Life which is a simulation of how 'cells' interact with neighbours and what can happen depending on the number of neighbours. I was interested in this however, I decided to do another idea instead as I found that more interesting and it fell within the requirements of the NEA criteria. This hackathon, is to revisit the Game of Life and create a functioning simulation in WinForms.
What it does
It is a simulation that contains a grid of cells. Each cell has either two states they can be in, alive (light blue) or dead (dark blue) and this depends on 4 criteria when it comes to interactions with its neighbours:
- Any live cell with 2 or 3 neighbours (adjacent cells) more to the next generation
- Any live cell with fewer than 2 or greater than 3 neighbours becomes a dead cell.
- Both live and dead cells with stay in the same state in the next generation.
How we built it
Understood the rules of this zero-player game and create a GUI that can display the code through the use of WinForms.
Challenges I ran into
One of the main challenges was coding in a language that I haven't used in a while so getting used to the syntax again was an issue, but since Java is similar to C# in some aspects. I got there eventually. Another issue was that deciding to do a hackathon solo meant the workload increased.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
It works!!!
What we learned
-Understanding new features of C# and WinForms. -Using more short-handed methods of writing code.
What's next for Game of Life
Making the code run more efficiently and removing the 'janky' code. Implement more features into the code such as pre-sets for patterns and different conditions that the cells can interact with.
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