sacsar / csc-22100-assignment4

CSc 22100 Assignment 4: Conway's Game of Life

⚠️ UPDATE 2022-03-16 I switched from using x and y in the Position class to row and column. The positions are supposed to be numbered as if they were elements of a matrix.

⚠️ UPDATE 2022-03-27 It was pointed out that there is nothing do for Step (3). Similarly, you might consider Steps (2) and (4) one task.

In this assignment, you'll implement Conway's Game of Life as a JavaFX application.

Rules

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton that exists on an infinite two-dimensional grid. Like the elementary cellular automata of Assignment 2, each cell is either alive or dead. Unlike in assignment 2, each cell has eight neighbor, not just two. The "evolution" of a cell is governed by the following rules:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Remember that the grid is infinite, meaning that, even if we don't display a cell's neighbor they still exist.

What's in the box?

• The csc22100.assignment4 package contains some classes to help you implement the Game of Life:
  • Position to represent a position in the grid with an (x, y) coordinate
  • Direction an enum for the different directions
• csc22100.assignment4.GameOfLifeApplication is the entry point for the application and wires all the pieces together
• csc22100.assignment4.ui.GameOfLifeController is the "view" of the MVVM architecture (it's called "controller" because JavaFX was designed with MVC in mind and it would be the "controller" piece of MVC)
• csc22100.assignment4.ui.GameOfLifeViewModel is, unsurprisingly the view model.

Your Mission

1. Implement evolve in the Life class. (Recommendation: Do a 5x5 or 10x10 example on paper and then write some unit tests.)
2. Complete init in GameOfLifeController to bind the various UI elements to functions in the GameOfLifeViewModel
3. I did this step for you. Implement receiveNotification in the GameOfLifeViewModel. After an evolution, the view model will receive a notification from the LifeService containing the new state. You then need to update the view model (and thus the view).
4. Wire the start, stop, step and reset buttons in the view/GameOfLifeController to the GameOfLifeViewModel. I created a start method, you'll need to add the others.
5. Wire up the slider so that it controls how long to sleep between evolutions.

Additional Specifications/Requirements

• The buttons should be enabled/disabled as appropriate:
  • When the simulation is running, only the stop button should be active
  • When the simulation is stopped, the start, reset and step buttons should be active, but stop should be disabled

Grading

As usual, submit the zip file from the packageAssignment task and your source code as a separate PDF.

Item	Points
Correct submitted artifacts	1pt
Code compiles	1pt
Life tests pass	1pt
UI tests pass	1pt
Manual UI test	2pt
Readability/Style	2pt