Conway's Game of Life in Javascript/Canvas

Examples

View examples of this script in action here:
http://nomatteus.github.com/conway-game-of-life-js/examples/

Note: Best viewed in Chrome

What is Conway's Game of Life?

Wikipedia has a great article, including many examples: Conway's_Game_of_Life on Wikipedia

How to Run

Create new GameOfLife object, and pass it the grid size, cell size, a canvas ID, and an array containing the starting cells:

var game = new GameOfLife(grid_width, grid_height, cell_width, cell_height, "life");

Here's a sample with parameters:

// Must be same size as game dimensions 
//  (10 x 10 in this case)
var starting_cells = [
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
],
params = {
  canvas_id:    "life",
  cell_width:   10,
  cell_height:  10,
  init_cells:   starting_cells
},
game = new GameOfLife(params);

Advance the game to the next step:

game.step();

To run this as an animation, just set an interval to call game.step(). In this example, it will update every second, but you can modify it to use any millisecond value:

var interval = setInterval(game.step, 1000);

You can stop the animation by calling clearInterval:

clearInterval(interval);

Parameters

// DOM ID of <canvas> element
canvas_id:    "life"

// Pixel width/height of a single cell
cell_width:   10,
cell_height:  10,

// Multi-dimensional Array of Cell Starting Positions
init_cells:   starting_cells

// If true, each cell is assigned a random RGBA colour value
colourful:    true

// Alternate spelling works too ;)
// colorful:     true

See examples folder for more working demos.

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