Go Game of Life

A fast and scalable implementation of Conway’s Game of Life in Go running in the terminal.
Supports both boarded boards and sparse infinite boards.

Features

• Infinite board mode (sparse storage, scales to very large grids).
• Boarded board mode with fixed width/height determined by the widht and height of the terminal.
• Terminal rendering (via termbox-go).
• Keyboard controls for pausing and adjusting speed.
  • pause: <SPACE>
  • quit: <ESC>
  • speed up/down: +/-
  • pan board with arrows: left, right, up and down
  • reset board origin: r
• Unicode characters for smooth board visualization.
• Statistics tracking:
  • Generation count
  • Alive cells
  • Born / Died cells per tick

Run

Clone repo:

git clone https://github.com/nbu/go-life.git

Run code:

cd go-life
# Get usage info
go run . --help

# Run simulation for 100 generation on the infinite board with 50ms step interval using objects/spaceship/canadagrey.cells initial layout file
go run . -s 50ms -g 100 -t infinite -f objects/spaceship/canadagrey.cells

# Run random board for 1000 generations with 100% population on the infinite board with 10ms step interval
go run . s -p 100 -s 10ms -g 1000 -t infinite

Demo