This is a c implementation of John Conway's famous 'Game of Life'. The rules of the 'game' are simple. The universe of the game is a torus-connected two dimensional grid filled with 'live' cells (denoted by 'X' in my implementation) and 'dead' cells (denoted by ' '). At the beginning of the game, the grid is randomly populated with a some distribution of live and dead cells, and cells are either born or destroyed based on their interactions with their eight neighbors:

1. Any live cell with fewer than 2 living neighbors dies of loneliness.
2. Any live cell with more than 3 living neighbors dies of overcrowding.
3. A live cell with 2 or 3 neighbors continues on to the next generation
4. A dead cell surrounded by exactly 3 neighbors will be made live

Based on these rules, certain patterns occur, some dynamic, some static. For example,

XX    and      XX
XX            X  X
               XX

are static patterns. That is, they are stable. An example of a dynamic pattern is a 'blinker':

          X 
XXX ----> X ----> XXX ----> ...
          X

and this movement, if uninhibited, will continue forever. There are patterns that move around the board as well, but it is harder to illustrate their behavior through text.

I make use of the Pthreads library for this implementation. I am sure there are single threaded versions of this game that are far simpler and more efficient than this version, but the purpose of this project was to teach myself some basic threading techniques. To that end, the code is way over-commented, and I also code my own pthread barrier, even though the Pthread library includes a pre-made barrier.

There is a 'generation counter' that keeps track of the generation that we are on. Sometimes it is 1 or 2 generations off -- I'm not sure whether it's an issue with the generation counter display, or my simulation actually runs 1 or 2 generations less/more than desired. In any case, this is a relatively small error.