The Game of Life is a Cellular Automaton created by Mathematician John Conway. The rules are very simple: square cells are aligned in a grid (which should, in principle, be infinite in size). Each cell has two states: “alive” (blue background) or “dead.”
With each step, a cell’s status is dependent on the status of its neighbors (which includes diagonals) as follows:
1) If a live cell has two or three live neighbors, it stays alive; otherwise it dies.
2) If a dead cell has two live neighbors it becomes live; otherwise it stays dead.
The surprising complexity and intricacy of a Game of Life system’s behavior — even, often times, under seemingly simple initial conditions — has attracted research from a wide variety of academic fields, including Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics,
Economics, Evolutionary Biology, and more.
This particular implementation of the Game of Life was created with the following technologies:
HTML/CSS: Graphic interface of the board itself
JavaScript/jQuery: Back-end logic
jQuery-UI: Slider and drop-down menu widgets