Entwickeln

A JavaScript library for Conway's Game of Life

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Usage
• APIs

Introduction

Entwickeln is a JavaScript library for Conway's Game of Life. The rules are implemented as described in the Wikipedia entry of the game:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused 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.

Entwickeln employs periodic boundary conditions and has a set of APIs for accessing and editing a game.

Installation

Entwickeln is available as an NPM package:

npm install entwickeln

import entwickeln from 'entwickeln';

A minified library version is also available in the /lib directory of this repository. It can be included in a project with the script tag in HTML. For example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/entwickeln.min.js"></script>

Usage

import entwickeln from './entwickeln';
 
// Initialise Entwickeln as a 40 x 20 grid
entwickeln.init(2, 2);
// [
//   [{ state: 'new', gen: 0 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }],
//   [{ state: 'dead', gen: 0 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }]
// ]
 
// Accessing the game's grid
entwickeln.game;
// [
//   [{ state: 'new', gen: 0 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }],
//   [{ state: 'dead', gen: 0 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }]
// ]
 
// Move the game forward by one generation
entwickeln.evolve();
// [
//   [{ state: 'dead', gen: 1 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }],
//   [{ state: 'dead', gen: 0 }, { state: 'dead', gen: 0 }]
// ]
 

APIs

entwickeln.game

An array of arrays in which every value is an object representing the current state of the cell, for example:

{
  state: 'new'
  gen: 0
}

The state property can take the a value of 'dead', 'new' or 'alive':

• 'dead'—an "unoccupied" cell
• 'new'—a cell that became "occupied" during the last evolution/iteration
• 'alive'—a cell that has been "occupied" for more than one generation

The gen property holds a number that indicates the generation the last state change occurred for this particular cell.

entwickeln.generation

A number that indicates the current generation of the game.

entwickeln.init(width, height[, alpha])

A function that initialises the game at generation 0 with the specified width and height and randomly populates the cells. A cell populated in this manner takes the form of { state: 'new', gen: 0 }.

width

An integer that specifies the length of the game, in number of cells.

height

An integer that specifies the height of the game, in number of cells.

[alpha]

An optional parameter that takes a value with a magnitude of less than 1; it is used as the probability cutoff for randomly populating the game. A value of 0 means that a game will be initialised without any living cells; a value of 1 means that the game will be completely populated. The default value is 0.25.

Return value

An array of arrays, where the number of nested arrays corresponds to the height of the game and the length of each nested array corresponds to the width of the game.

entwickeln.evolve([generations][, target])

A function that calculates and return the next generation of the game.

[generations]

An optional parameter that is an integer greater than 1, it indicates the number of generations to simulate. The default value is 1.

It is worth noting that generations are typically not "skipped" in a game of life. The option to specify the number of generations to simulate is designed for potentially creating reasonably time-accurate Game of Life, where rendering may not necessarily occur for every generation.

[target]

An optional argument that is an array of arrays representing the game. Using this optional parameter prevents entwickeln.evolve from updating entwickeln.game. This option is primarily designed for prediction or use outside a Game of Life implementation.

Return value

An array of arrays that represents the latest generation, where the number of nested arrays corresponds to the height of the game and the length of each nested array corresponds to the width of the game.

entwickeln.restart()

A function for restarting the game with the width, height and alpha used to initialise the current game.

Return value

An array of arrays, where the number of nested arrays corresponds to the height of the game and the length of each nested array corresponds to the width of the game.

entwickeln.edit(x, y, state)

A function for editing the state of a given cell in the current generation of the game.

x

An integer that represents the x-coordinate of the cell to be edited.

y

An integer that represents the y-coordinate of the cell to be edited.

state

A string that indicates the target state of the target cell. It takes the value of "dead", "new", or "alive".

entwickeln.toggle(x, y)

A function for toggling the state of a cell, from either "new" or "alive" to "dead", or from "dead" to "new". It is a syntactic sugar built upon the edit function.