The Game of Life, invented by Cambridge mathematician John H. Conway, is a "cellular automaton" supposed to model the genetic laws for birth, survival and death. It became widely known when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970.
The Game of Life is a no-player game. One interacts with it by seeding it and observing how it evolves.
This is my version in Java Swing using LinkedList.
The game requires Java to run. Download and install the latest version and then download the game_of_life.jar file from the releases. Double click it to run or on the command line type:
java -jar game_of_life.jar
You can also try the Java applet version I made and run this game thru your web browser if it still supports it. Click this applet page to see it.
You can also view it using the AppletViewer if you have it installed. First create an index.html file, which contains the following:
<APPLET archive="game_of_life.jar"
code="LifeApplet.class"
width=640
height=480>
</APPLET>
and save it in the same location as your game_of_life.jar file. Then run:
appletviewer index.html
If you have JDK and Apache Ant installed then you can build it yourself just by typing:
ant
It would create a build directory and the jar file would be inside that directory.
There is a similar project from Matthew Burke from where I took the idea on how to implement the main algorithm of the game and some code on GUI formatting and re-sizing. You can find his project here: https://github.com/Burke9077/Conway-s-Game-of-Life