Game of Life:

What's Game of Life?

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input.
More info avaiable here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

To tackle this problem, I’ve decided that I will use multiple functions in this case 4 each des out different objectives.

1. populateArray – setup array based on user input and convert it to int.
2. nextTick – acts like a next game iteration, used to simulate the life using the given rules
3. countNeighbours – counts how many alive cells are there around the cell.
4. printMatrix– prints easily modifiable output, to print different steps

The solution is as follows

● First populate the array with user input
● (in a while loop) next tick (next generation decider based on rules) uses count Neighbours
● Print Matrix

populateArray

The first idea behind this function was to make it Boolean based as to save memory and sp since C doesn’t come by default with Boolean like in Java or Python I was forced to use int instead the function takes the input and creates an array of 0’s 1’s with int property where dead cells and 1 represents alive.

nextTick

This function is responsible for simulation of the life, it does that by using countNieghbours determining what should happen based on the rules provided below.
-Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours die, as if caused by an under population.
-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

countNeighbours

Count the neighbours around cell (x,y) ie. if cell (0,1) is given it will be the first column and 2 rows. Which means there are only 6 possible checks to doas the program is designed to not go over the boundaries given by the user at the start. -Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours die, as if caused by an under population.

printMatrix

Prints the output the given step, as it’s run at the end only the end result is printed but this is a very useful debugging function as it can be used to demonstrate how the program behaves as it goes through steps. This function uses 2 for loops to iterate over columns and rows for the end result.