Reflection

I was first introduced to Conway's Game of Life as a child, at a science museum near where I grew up. I... didn't get it. It didn't seem like much of a "game," at the time. But I liked watching the animations that resulted. With age, I've come to appreciate the beauty of the game.

My first implementation of the game consisted of solely text, and a fixed size board. The governing algorithm of the cellular automata was naive and quite slow. I went through a few iterations and learned a good deal about optimization and solving the same problem in a variety of ways with a variety of tools.

The board is programmed to "wrap" in a toroidal fashion. I found that generated more interesting animations. The initial state of the board is generated pseudo-randomly for some unpredictable fun.