Conway’s Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life is a homebrew demo by James Friend released on 15 April 2020. It generates a random board of cells and follows the rules of the Game of Life by John Horton Conway.

You can get the demo from its download page by using the password lifeofgames. You can also get the Libultra source code from Github.

About Conway’s Game of Life

The Game of Life isn’t so much a game as it is a simulation of cells in a 2D grid. The grid starts off with some cells being set to ‘live’ or ‘dead’, and each turn the grid changes based on these rules:

• A live cell with fewer than two neighbors dies from underpopulation.
• A live cell with two or three neighbors survives to the next generation.
• A live cell with more than three neighbors dies from overcrowding.
• A dead cell with exactly three neighbors becomes a live cell through reproduction.

The purpose of the Game of Life is to create patterns that allow interesting animations to occur. Typically this involves creating an ‘object’ that either moves in a particular way or is dynamically self-sustaining.

In this N64 recreation of the Game of Life, the game only allows you to generate a random board of live/dead cells and see how the game proceeds from there.

The borders of the grid are considered to be ‘dead’ cells so there is a heavy bias towards there being fewer live neighbours on the edge cells. This makes it so each round reaches equilibrium within a minute or so.

You can use the A button to generate a new random board, or B to switch to ‘dark mode’. I don’t think there’s a way to create a specific pattern though.

Review and conclusion

Conway’s Game of Life has always been one of those fascinating things that everyone in computer science knows as being a way of expressing art in a way that only computers can understand. There are entire communities built around making designs and patterns that behave in a predictable and consistent way. It’s even considered to be Turing complete if you have a grid that’s big enough.

The demo itself is lets you visualise a random pattern which interesting but is in the end beholden to randomness. It would be great to have a board that can be zoomed/scrolled, be able to draw in your own designs or even save them for later. But as a simple test/experiment, I think it works well to demonstrate the way that Conway’s game of life works.

I even managed to generate a glider once 🙂