Homework 1

Due: Friday, September 9

For this homework assignment, code up two versions of John Conway's Game of Life simulation: a time-stepped and an event-driven version. For an introduction to the Game of Life, see http://abc.net.au/science/holo/lablife.htm.

Your program should input the size of the grid (number of rows and columns) as well as the number of time steps to be simulated as command line parameters. The initial placement of live cells should also be input in a file. The program should output in some fashion the state of the grid at the end of each time step. The event-driven and time-driven versions should give identical results.

Turn in all source code as well as a brief document describing how to install and run your program. You may code this assignment in any programming language, however, your program must be able to run on one of the public CoC machines. Provide a brief description highlight interesting aspects of your code, especially the event-driven version (describe what are the events). It is not acceptable for your event driven simulation to simply schedule a single new event at each time step! Obviously, it is also not permissible to simply turn in a code you found on the web! You must clearly document your code so the TA can easily understand what you did.

Turn in your assignment via an email to the TA.