Posted on 02/08/2011. By Pete Otaqui.
As part of an interesting exercise at work, I built an implementation of Conway’s Game Of Life in Javascript. If you haven’t come across the Game Of Life, it’s really quite interesting and worth looking at. My colleagues also made variations, including canvas-based and Web GL 3 dimensional (there was even discussion about n-dimensional, with sliders to view the 4th, 5th and further dimensions). My particular take was to make the game space “infinite” rather than a fixed grid.
It’s not really infinite of course, I haven’t made any attempt to have a position greater than Number.MAX_VALUE. The real point is that it is possible to have a huge playing area, and only the living & possibly-living-next-round cells are taken into account.
I avoided using any ready-made frameworks, in part so that it could be transported to the server-side on top of something like NodeJS – I was imagining a multi-player game where each user could “paint” cells onto the canvas, and maybe even that next-generation cells would take an identifier from their parents, letting people “fight”. I haven’t really got the time for that at the moment, but it seemed a nice idea.