Course:CPSC312-2017-Game-of-life-haskell
Title
Authors: Aiden, Sveta, Robert
What is the problem?
Our goal was to make a version of Conway's Game of Life. We created an implementation with different starting states for the user to use it, while also aiming to make it a robust version because we are using user inputs to set specific parameters, and we did not want it to be easily corrupted by a person playing it.
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead, or "populated" or "unpopulated". Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
- 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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
What is the something extra?
Our first in-depth aspect is creating a UI which will display the grid and the evolution of cells. We also allowed user to set the parameters of the game: the size of the grid, and one of the starting presets. In addition to that, we are also allowing the user to set their own rules if they choose to do so.
What did we learn from doing this?
First of all, it turned that it is hard to find a nice GUI package for Haskell, especially if you work on Mac. However, Haskell works really nicely for a program of a Game-of-Life style and when you have to work with IO as it allows for a nice implementation without it being too cumbersome.