Game of Life or Death (single-player)

Overview

What if Conway's Game of Life were a game you could actually play?

The standard rules of the Game of Life are as follows:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

In addition to the above rules, Game of Life or Death adds the following:

• At each step, the player can manually override the state of a single row of cells. This is called the "Activation" zone.
• Some cells are designated as "goal" cells. If all goal cells become alive during a single step, the player is victorious.

With these two additional rules, we now have a playable game with a simple objective: bring the goal cells to life!

Scoring

To add a bit more flavor to this game, you can try to achieve victory while scoring the least number of points possible (like golf).

The score is calculated as follows:

Score = (Total Step Count + Total Activation Count) * Max Per-Turn Activations

The definitions for each component are as follows:

• Total Step Count: The total number of "steps" or "state transitions" that have occurred since the beginning of the game.
• Total Activation Count: The total number of cells that have been alive in the activation zone since the beginning of the game.
• Max Per-Turn Activations: The maximum number of cells that were simultaneously alive in the activation zone at any step since the beginning of the game

Can you get a score lower than 120?