[krisoft]

Did they tell you to implement “Conway's Game of Life” in that many words, or they gave you the rules they wanted to implement?

If the first, that sounds like a terrible question. If the second, that sounds like a quite straightforward fizbuz style coding task.

> I'm well aware of GoL and maybe should know how to do it

What do you mean “should know how to do it”? I don’t think you should have memorised the rules, or an implementation. But I think if you are a software developer you should be able to turn human language into code. That is a key skill of the job.