Google Sheets Meets Game of Life: My Google Apps Script Adventure 🎲

A Google Sheet, being essentially a two-dimensional array, is perfect for this task!

What Is the Game of Life?

According to Wikipedia, the Game of Life “is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.”

It begins on a two-dimensional grid of square cells. Each cell can be either alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight immediate neighbors. A live cell only remains alive if it has two or three living neighbors. If it has fewer than two living neighbors, it dies as if by underpopulation. Conversely, if it has more than three, it dies as if by overpopulation. A dead cell remains dead unless it has exactly three living neighbors; otherwise, it becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

By simultaneously recalculating the state of the cells, we can create a new generation, and another one, and so on. In some cases, the cells all ultimately die, whereas in other cases, they do not. Along the way, they might even form some interesting patterns (more on them later).

With this simple set of rules, we are looking at a simulation that plays out like this: