Game of Life

A C++ implementation of Conway's Game of Life built with an MVC architecture, developed as an academic project at PUC.

The program simulates an interactive cellular automaton on a configurable grid, allowing the user to place cells, step through generations manually or automatically, and persist game states to disk.

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Background

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised in 1970 by the British mathematician John Horton Conway. It is a zero-player game: the entire evolution of the system is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input once set. Despite consisting of only four rules applied to a two-dimensional grid, the automaton is Turing complete and capable of producing a wide range of complex, self-organizing behavior.

The four rules are:

1. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes alive (reproduction).
2. A live cell with two or three live neighbors survives (survival).
3. A live cell with more than three live neighbors dies (overpopulation).
4. A live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies (underpopulation).

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Features

• Configurable grid size from 10x10 up to 60x60
• Manual cell placement and removal before or during simulation
• Step-by-step generation control or continuous automatic simulation
• Save and load game states via geracoes.dat
• In-program display of the game rules

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Architecture

The project follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern:

Model (JVIDA-KLRR-MODEL.h / .cpp) — Defines the data structures for cells and the three tracked cell lists: living, dead, and next generation.

View (JVIDA-KLRR-VIEW.h / .cpp) — Handles all terminal output, including grid rendering, menus, and rule display.

Controller (JVIDA-KLRR-CONTROLLER.h / .cpp) — Contains the core simulation logic: neighbor counting, grid state transitions, save/load operations, and overall game flow.

Entry Point (JVIDA-KLRR-MAIN.cpp) — Instantiates the components and starts the program.

Persistence (geracoes.dat) — Binary file written and read by the program to store generation snapshots.

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Platform Note

The code uses <windows.h> for Sleep() and system("cls"), making it Windows-native out of the box. To build on Linux or macOS, replace:

• Sleep(ms) with usleep(ms * 1000) from <unistd.h>
• system("cls") with system("clear")

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Building

g++ JVIDA-KLRR-MAIN.cpp JVIDA-KLRR-MODEL.cpp JVIDA-KLRR-VIEW.cpp JVIDA-KLRR-CONTROLLER.cpp -o jogo_da_vida

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Authors

Developed by the KLRR group as part of the curriculum at PUC:

• Kaua Bezerra Brito
• Liam Vedovato Lopes
• Raul Kolaric
• Rodrigo Ward Leite

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References

• Gardner, M. (1970). Mathematical Games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". Scientific American, 223(4), 120–123.