Conway's Game of Life

This project implements a simple visualization of Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The program reads an initial configuration from a file, then iteratively applies the rules of the Game of Life, displaying each generation on the terminal.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Options
• Example
• File Format
• Contributing
• License

Installation

To compile the program, you need a C compiler like gcc. Clone this repository and compile the program using the following command:

gcc -o conway main.c -I./include -L./lib -lconway

Ensure that the conway.h and readfile.h header files are located in the include directory and any necessary libraries are in the lib directory.

Usage

Run the program with the following command:

./conway [-f FILE] [-i ITERATIONS] [-s INTERVAL]

Options

• -f FILE : Specifies the file from which to read the initial configuration. Default is a.dat.
• -i ITERATIONS : Sets the number of iterations (generations) to visualize. Default is 10.
• -s INTERVAL : Sets the time interval (in tenths of a second) between frames. Default is 1 (0.1 seconds).
• -h : Displays the help message.

Example

./conway -f initial.dat -i 50 -s 2

This command runs the Game of Life using the initial configuration in initial.dat, iterating 50 times with a 0.2-second pause between each frame.

File Format

The input file should contain a matrix where each cell is either 1 (alive) or 0 (dead). For example:

0 1 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 0
1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0

This represents a simple initial configuration for the Game of Life.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please fork the repository and submit a pull request with your changes. Make sure to follow the coding style and add appropriate tests for your changes.

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Written by Giovanni Zaccaria - LoZack19