The Wellington Coding Dojo

The Wellington Coding Dojo February Meetup

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Feb 17 Wed 3:00 AM

Location: This location is shown only to members

A Coding Dojo is a place where programmers come to improve their skills, by following a pattern similar to the martial arts dojo.

Participants meet a a prearranged time in a room that has one computer attached to a screen. A programming challenge is posed for each session. During the session, the group spends a preset amount of time developing a solution to the challenge. At the end of the session the code is discarded (though it may be archived for future reference and study). The amount of time spent on the problem is fixed. Regardless of the state of the solution, when the time expires, the session is done.

This month, the theme of the Coding Dojo will be the 'Game of Life'. The Game of Life is a simulation of cell life invented by John Conway in the 1970. (You can read the original Scientific American article here).

The rules (taken from the Wikipedia page) are as follows:

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths happen simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the one before). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

We will be implementing the business logic of our Game of Life application. The application will be written using Java and Maven, with a heavy use of test-driven design. It will be interesting to see how far we get!