Gosper's Glider Gun
I just posted a new Android app to the market: DroidLife, an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. CGoL is a simulation (zero-player game) of cellular life (don’t confuse it with Milton Bradley’s Game of Life, a board game). The app bundles many interesting seeds, and allows users to download thousands of others and run them as well. Seeds are just initial simulation states, and more specifically are simply a set of one or more points on a grid representing live cells. There are around 4 “standard” seed file formats. DroidLife understands the most common / simple of those, Life 1.06. The most complete repository of seed files can be found on LifeWiki.
I was initially motivated to write this app as it was the topic of an interview question, for which I was only able to give a mediocre answer. One thing is for sure, if anyone ever asks me about CGoL again in my life, I have enough information to bore them for hours. I also saw it as a chance to get my feet wet with some trivial graphics on Android. Credit to “MrSnowFlake” for putting together this game template (bump) thread, based on Android’s Lunar Lander sample, which helped me get started. Without it my ramp up time would have been much greater.
Depending on my time, here are a few things I’d like to add to the app,
- Read other file formats: RLE, PlainText, Life 1.05
- Save game state to file
- Seed editor: define you own seeds
A b1s12 world seeded with a single cell
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