The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.

A cellular automaton is a model which consists of cell objects that exist on a grid, where each cell has a 'state', and a 'neighbourhood' of adjacent cells.

The game evolves through a series of generations, and is known as a zero-player game, meaning that the evolution is determined by the initial state of the world, and no further input is required.

• 2D grid of square cells

• Cells have two states: 'Alive' or 'Dead'

• The neighbours consist of the 8 surrounding cells.

• If a cell is at the edge of the grid, the neighbours wrap to the other side.

• Visualise the game in the console.

• Be able to define how big the world/grid is.

• Be able to set the initial state of the world.

Advanced: Allow world state to be saved and loaded from disk.

For the game to evolve to the next generation, each cell is compared to a series of rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

Once you have cloned the repository, you can run the program using the following steps:

1. Navigate to the correct directory using cd conways-game-of-life/src/ConsoleApp

2. Use dotnet run to run the program using the default file.

OR

3. Use dotnet run {filePath} where filePath = the location of a json file configured in the same format as the default file found in conways-game-of-life/src/ConsoleApp/InputFiles

   For example, using dotnet run ~/Documents/GameOfLife/my-game.json will run a json file that I have stored in my documents folder.

To generate a report of the code coverage for unit testing:

1. Run dotnet test --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage"

2. Install the report generator tool using dotnet tool install -g dotnet-reportgenerator-globaltool

3. Run the following command, replacing {guid} with the guid name of the folder generated in conways-game-of-life/tests/GameOfLifeTests/TestResults when you run the command in the first step.

reportgenerator "-reports:./tests/GameOfLifeTests/TestResults/{guid}/coverage.cobertura.xml" "-targetdir:coveragereport" -reporttypes:Html

3. This will generate a HTML file (conways-game-of-life/coveragereport/index.html) which will display the current code coverage.

This program was completed for a Language Design Quorum as a part of the Future Maker's Academy at MYOB.

Source: https://github.com/MYOB-Technology/General_Developer/blob/main/katas/kata-conways-game-of-life/kata-conways-game-of-life.md