Game of Life

An implementation of Conway's Game of Life in C++ and CUDA for the terminal and SDL Graphics.

Configuration

Some things are easy to configure.

Colours

There are five color stages for cells: alive, dead, and three dying stages in between. They're configured in colours.h. By default, the CPU and CUDA versions have some clever colours.

Rules

Additionally, by default the original rules from Conway's Game of Life are used, and they're configured in rules.h, which is used by all versions.

Building

Install the following dependencies:

• g++ or clang++.
  • Prepend CXX=<compiler> to your make command to specify.
• nvcc (CUDA only)
  • Make sure the $PATH is set correctly to find the CUDA libraries and the nvcc binary.
• sdl2 and sdl2-image (optional)

And run Make rule for the desired version.

make gol-cpu
make gol-cuda

# If you do not have sdl2/sdl2-image
make gol-cpu-term
make gol-cuda-term

Usage

gol-<version> <graphics-cell-size> <height> <width> <transitions> <period> [<fill>]

Where:

• graphic-cell-size is a non-negative integer to indicate the width and height of each cell in SDL graphics.
  • Use 0 for terminal mode. (Required for *-term versions.)
• height is the number of rows in the field.
• width is the number of columns in the field.
• transitions is the number of transitions/cycles/iterations of the Game of Life.
  • Use -1 for infinite transitions.
• period is the number of milliseconds between transitions.
• fill is the percentage of the field that is filled at the start. This is a probabilistic randomized initiation.
  • Use a value between [0-100].

Quit

• In the terminal, issue Ctrl-C to interrupt and quit.
• If in graphics mode, pressing q or closing the window as normal (i.e. click red x) will also work.

Acknowledgements

• fsan/cuda_on_sdl for guidance on SDL graphics and CUDA rendering.