madelyneriksen / game-of-life

Conway's Game of Life, written in pure Python.

Conway's Game of Life

Life implemented in pure Python3, visualized with curses and kept on a sparse matrix.

Getting Started

You will need to have Python3 installed on your system with curses support. There are no additional dependencies!

Clone the project and start a game with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/madelyneriksen/game-of-life life
cd life
python3 life.py

Move around on the board with hjkl. You can close the game by pressing either q or C-c!

How It Works

Rather than representing the board with a matrix, numpy array, or Python list, we're using a dictionary. In mathematics, a representation of a sparse matrix with a dictionary is called a dictionary of keys, where all absent values are assumed to be zero.

Live cells are stored under their (x, y) coordinates:

{
    (10, 11): 1,
}

Curses then only renders cells that are on the visible screen.

License

All code in this project is MIT Licensed.