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Conway's Game of Life

The game of life consists of a two-dimensional grid of cells. At any given time, every grid element is either "alive" or not. The colony takes an evolution step and a new colony develops from the old one. The single-step evolution rule is simple: the element at row, col is alive in the new generation if

• element row, col is alive in the old generation and exactly 2 or 3 of its eight neighbors are alive, or

• element row, col is not alive in the old generation and exactly 3 of its eight neigbors are alive.

For example, using '*' for alive and '.' for not, one evolution step would be:

+------+         +------+
|..*...|         |......|
|..*...|   ==>   |.***..|
|..*...|         |......|
+------+         +------+                
              

This problem set is an exercise in working with 2D arrays to model the evolving colony of cells. The initial configuration is given in a text file using '*' for the initial live elements. Your program should read the file into a 2D array and use the graphics library to render the colony graphically. For example, the input file one.txt should produce the repeating sequence of colonies shown in this video:

1. 16 Points: You're on your own! Write the entire program from scratch.

2. 13 Points: You can request code for reading the input text file into a 2D array.

3. 10 Points: You can request code for reading the input text file into a 2D array and the code for rendering the graphics.