Conway's game of life (screensaver)

Introduction

This is a screensaver coded in C#.net which represents conway's game of life, the cellular automata designed by John Conway.

Every tick, each cell decides whether it should be active or inactive based on the number of surrounding active cells, as follows:

• 0-1: become inactive
• 2: remain as-is
• 3: become active
• 4-8: become inactive

The screensaver starts with a small configuration of cells designed to produce interesting patterns as time goes on.

Customisation

The screensaver includes a configuration menu, allowing the user to customise many aspects of the simulation, as follows:

• Cell size
• Update frequency
• Initial configuration (seed)
• Cell and background colours
• Keepalive mechanism (the method of preventing the board becoming stagnant and repetitive)
• Cell borders
• Colour Mutations (newly created cells inherit their colours from neighbors, with slight variance)

Every element of the configuration menu has a tooltip explaining what it is, so that the user does not need a manual to find out what does what.