Conway's Game of Life in Python

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As a lover of classic games and a Python programmer, I was excited to have the opportunity to implement the game of life in Python using PyQt5.

For those unfamiliar with the game of life, it is a cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game consists of a grid of cells, each of which can be either alive or dead. At each step, the state of each cell is updated based on the state of its neighbors according to a set of rules.

I began by importing the necessary modules and defining the GameOfLife class, which is a subclass of QWidget. In the init method, I set the number of rows and columns in the grid, initialized a numpy array to hold the state of the cells, and set the size of the widget to match the size of the grid.

Next, I added a paintEvent method, which is called whenever the widget needs to be redrawn. This method loops through each cell in the grid and draws a black rectangle if the cell is alive, and nothing if the cell is dead.

I also added a mousePressEvent method, which allows the user to interact with the game by clicking on cells to toggle their state.

To advance the game to the next step, I added a step method, which calculates the new state of each cell based on the rules of the game. This method loops through each cell in the grid, counts the number of living neighbors and updates the state of the cell accordingly.

Finally, I added a get_neighbors method, which returns a list of the states of the cells in a 3x3 grid centered on the given cell. This method is used by the step method to determine the state of each cell in the next step of the game.

With the basic functionality in place, I added some polish to the user interface by displaying a label with the rules of the game and hiding it after the grid is randomized. I also added a timer to automatically advance the game to the next step every 100 milliseconds.

Overall, implementing the game of life in Python using PyQt5 was a fun and challenging experience. The resulting game is simple, yet engaging, and serves