What is game_of_life_asc?

This project is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life, a classic simulation where a grid of cells lives or dies each step based on four simple rules about how many neighbors it has. There is nothing to win or steer. A person draws a few starting cells, presses play, and watches the rules produce patterns on their own: shapes that flip back and forth forever, shapes that crawl diagonally across the grid, and shapes that fire off a new crawling shape every so often. What sets this version apart is how the simulation itself is built. The actual rule calculations run entirely inside a small WebAssembly module, compiled from a language called AssemblyScript, rather than being computed in the browser's regular JavaScript. The interface layer, written with the SolidJS framework and TypeScript, only handles drawing cells and reacting to mouse input. The simulation runs on an infinite plane rather than a fixed size grid, so there is no edge to run into, and live cells are tracked using a hash set so the grid can grow without limit. The interface itself is intentionally simple and mostly black and white, with color reserved for the cells themselves. A cell is colored based on how long it has been alive: newly created cells appear warm, and cells that survive many generations gradually shift toward a cooler blue tone, so long lived stable shapes look visually different from freshly changing areas. The README suggests a few things to try, such as drawing cells by hand, loading a pre-built pattern called a glider gun from a built-in pattern library, or dropping in a five-cell starting pattern called an R-pentomino and watching it run for over a thousand generations before settling down. There is also a dark mode that recolors the whole scene. To run it locally, a person needs Node.js 18 or newer, then installs dependencies, compiles the WebAssembly engine from its AssemblyScript source, and starts the development server. The project includes an automated test suite that checks the simulation behaves correctly for known patterns like a blinker, a block, and a glider. It builds as a static site, so it can be deployed to a static hosting platform such as Vercel, and the production build step recompiles the WebAssembly engine automatically.