Coding Challenge #85: The Game of Life

Im really glad you do all your code from scratch without internal functions or third party libraries. It really helps understand the logic involved.

Rest In Peace, John Conway 💜

if you already know the rules of Life, skip to 7:09

Dan, maybe someone already told you this, but I couldn't help noticing... In the live video last Friday you laughed at the suggestion of the Game of Life on a torus. But, ironically, this is exactly what you've done. Think about it... Wrapping left to right is equivalent to making the flat map into a cylinder. And then wrapping top to bottom takes that cylinder and bends it around so it forms a torus! The only thing you didn't do is render it in 3D. Now, that would be a coding challenge. :)

This is one of if not the best examples of how random and interesting an idea can be with such simple rules

When the cells just stay in one spot, We know they have gotten too smart, We know that they are building civilization, And we know they are going to war.

This is the best coding channel ever!

I really love the “game of life” , it on my Mac screen saver too, really enjoy the way you explain how the code works, checking the rules and then wrap around logic. Pls keep up the great work!!!

Thanks for this - nice to see it done in a modern language! I wrote this in BASIC on an 8-bit computer many moons ago, but each iteration took more than a minute, so I rewrote it to use a single 2-D grid. The state was held in the least significant bit, i.e. odd values were alive, evens were dead. I started with only 0 or 1 values, then scanned the array. If a cell was odd, I added 2 to each of the surrounding 8 cells, otherwise I skipped, saving a lot of processing time. Next I scanned the grid and if a cell contained 5, 6 or 7 the cell was alive so I made it 1, otherwise it was dead so I made it 0. This change got the processing time for each iteration down to a few seconds.

Perfect for training list, of course there´s easier ways to do it, but there are also people who need these kind of videos, this guy is th Bob Ross of coding

Every now and again Dan will check his super special ceiling notes.

Thanks for uploading, and showing. This is helping me understand the fun aspects of coding. Trying to land a job, no luck yet.

Wonderfull 35:46, the final music note just when the game fall into a stable state !!!! That was written ;) Nice job, Dan !!

Thank you, Daniel, another instructive and fun video. You‘re such an inspiration to me. Please keep on. I „co-programmed“ Asteroids following your suggestions, now I‘m working on Solitaire, learning the hard way how the loop() function is actually an interrupt, thus it is difficult to expect some variables to be set by functions called AFTER the loop() call😂

Sooo weird - I just discovered this channel with your old CA videos a few days ago and then here's this new video. My current Introduction to Programming/Java project is to make a tic tac toe game, and that seems so much less daunting after soaking in all of this witchery. lol I'm quite keen on trying to tackle The Game of Life. It's so helpful seeing a professional programmer's process step-by-step like this. Thanks!

I am working on mine.And I was Looking for some resource and then your video poped up in the notification.You always Help.Thanks

Outstanding! I have been fascinated by the Game Of Life for decades. I've wanted to try my hand at coding it, but always wondered how to get it from one generation to the next. I'll try making each cell an object and see what happens!!!

Daniel! Thanks for teaching me the moulus trick :) Glad you're well and of course... Welcome back ;)

The video is really helpful for me because this game was a few years ago on the matura exam in Poland so I enjoy watching you code the game. Greetings from Poland, dude :D

Love your vids, thank you so much for your service here. Once I heard you started with lingo like myself it all made sense why your methods clicked so well. cheers