Sacred Software

Life is an application I wrote for a contest held by CreateMacGames in early 2004. It is an implementation of John Conway's Game of Life. The Game of Life is not actually a game; it is simply a set of rules applied to a grid of binary cells. Each cell is either on (alive) or off (dead).

On each iteration, the number of neighbors of each cell is counted. If the cell is alive, and the number of neighbors is equal to either 2 or 3, the cell remains alive (survival). Otherwise, it dies (loneliness or overcrowding). If a cell is dead, and it has exactly 3 neighbors, it becomes a live cell (birth).

Life tied for first place out of six entries in the Life challenge. The entry with which it tied, coincidentally, was written by Will E. P., who teamed up with me a few weeks later to write Infiltration for an iDevGames contest.