GameOfLife

In 1970, Scientific American printed an article describing a game played on a board called The Game of Life. The original idea came from a mathmetician named Jim Conway. The game is was originally a version of solitaire, in which each generation of dots either lives, dies or reproduces, based upon how many neighbors it has. The article identifies many of the basic shapes found in running the game, and gives them names. It also explains the underlying theories behind the game.

Here is a link to a reprint of the article - Link

In this project, we will be using a known an documented Java project to do trouble shooting and problem solving in Java.

What we will do is to study the program, see how it works, see how it has been coded. Then we will go into the code, and make changes to it so that it works more the way we would like.

As a group, we should identify some basic themes we would like to follow so that we can work together.

Here is a link to a page that has the applet - http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

Here is a link to the code, which you should be able to view in Firefox - http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/code/

Here is a link to the documentation on Sourceforge - http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/code/javadoc/overview-summary.html

Here is a visual representation of the whole collection of programs - http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/code/gameoflife-uml.png

The code can be worked on in notepad, the text editor, or a syntax highlighting package, such as jcreator, textpad or notepad++

here is a link to notepad++ - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Wikipedia entry on the game - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life