Conway's Game of Life

Simple implementation of Conway's example of a cellular automaton.

Cellular automata are discrete evolutionary models defined on cell lattices, they can be used to generate fractals or random numbers for instance.

We use here an hybrid method, combining Python on the frontend and C on the backend. This allows easy visualization through matplotlib with enough performance to generate lattices of linear sizes ~ 5000. Square domains with periodic boundary conditions are in use.

To compile the c file to a library use:

gcc -fPIC -c gameoflife_evolve.c
gcc gameoflife_evolve.o -shared -o gameoflife_evolve.so