What is the Game of Life?
Conway's Game of Life is a simulation created by the mathematician John Horton Conway.
It is based on a two-dimensional infinite grid on which each pixel can be alive (black) or dead (white).
You can create an initial configuration of alive pixels and then start the game.
The game calculates the evolution of the pixels using certain rules.
You can find the (simple) rules on wikipedia.
The idea of the project
Some time ago I discovered the Game of Life and I thought: Why don't you implement it in Minecraft?
It is the perfect game to render this due to it being build in blocks, too.
So I sat down in front of my computer and wrote this little plugin that implements the Game of Life into Minecraft!
Features
This plugin can simulate and render the Game of Life into Minecraft.
You can give any configuration of living blocks as input and it will show you the evolution of your own little "population".
Note: The plugin was testet in the version 1.17! Other versions may not work.
Usage
After you have installed the plugin you can use /gol tp to teleport you to the world of the Game of Life and back.
Here you can click on a white block to make it black and the other way round.
If you have chosen your configuration you can just type in /gol start to start the simulation.
You can use /gol stop to stop the simulation at any time.
Finally, you can use /gol clear if you want a clean grid again.
How it works (For developers)
When the server starts the plugin creates a new flat world to which the player gets teleported with the command /gol tp.
Then there's a listener for the BlockBreakEvent that changes the block's type to white or black concrete and puts the block into a map.
If the player types in /gol start the next generation gets calculated and then rendered every 0.5 seconds until the player stops it with /gol stop or there are no players in the world anymore.