Self-printing Game of Life in C#

Make Pt1108
Igor writes-

Conway’s Game of Life has fascinated computer scientists for decades. Even though its rules are ridiculously simple, Conway’s universe gives rise to a variety of gliders, spaceships, oscillators, glider guns, and other forms of “life”. Self-printing programs are similarly curious, and - rather surprisingly - have an important place in the theory of computation.

What happens when you combine the two? You are about to find out, but one thing is for sure: the geekiness factor should be pretty high.

I wrote a little C# program that contains a Game-of-Life grid. The program advances the game grid to the next generation and prints out a copy of itself, with the grid updated. You can take the output, compile it with a C# compiler, run it, and you’ll get the next generation of the game. You can iterate the process, or change the initial grid state manually



When I first saw the title of this post I thought this might be a 3D printing thing that someone did with our Game of Life kit before I saw the C# part, but it's just as cool!


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Posted by: Anonymous on October 30, 2008 at 5:02 AM

arggh, self posting blog...


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