"Get a Life!" is an implementation of the famous "Life" simulation. It tracks the growth and change of a population of organisms on a board over time. The rules are very simple - each generation, the eight squares adjacent to each organism are examined to see if they are occupied by a neighboring organism. If there are zero or one neighbors, the organism dies of isolation. If there are four or more neighbors, the organism dies of overcrowding. Also, any empty spaces with exactly three neighbors will have an organism born next generation. Things keep continuing until either all organisms die out or you stop the game.
So, the important thing is now, how do you use this? The first thing to do is to create the board, by entering the number of rows and columns in the fields above, then hitting "Create!" After that, make the initial configuration of organisms by clicking where you want the organisms to go. Finally, when you're ready, click "Start!" and watch the show! You can also click "Stop!" to freeze the game cycle (like if you want to make any changes to the current layout) and "Clear!" to remove all the organisms from the board.
Here's a legend of the symbols on the board:
| An empty square on the board |
| A healthy, living organism |
| An organism that has just died |
| An organism that was just born |
Get a Life! was tested with both Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0. Make sure that you have JavaScript activated - if you don't, Get a Life is kind of non-functional.
