Conway’s Game Of Life using Python?


A British mathematician in an around 1970 created his “Game of Life” – which are basically a set of rules depicting the chaotic yet patterned growth of a colony of biological organisms. The “Game of Life” is a two-dimensional grid consists of “living” and “dead” cells.

Rules of Game of life

  • Overpopulation: A cell dies(off) if its surrounded by more than three living cells.

  • Static: A cell lives(on) if its surrounded by two or three living cells.

  • Underpopulation: A cell dies(off) if its surrounded by fewer than two living cells.

  • Reproduction: A cell becomes live(on) if a dead cell is surrounded by exactly three cells.

 Cell is going to die in the next timestamp

 Cell is going to live in the next timestamp

 Cell is alive

 Cell is dead

By applying above set of rules in sequential steps we’ll get beautiful and unexpected patterns.

Steps of implementation:

i. Initialise an empty universe
ii. Fill the universe with the seed
iii. Calculate if the current cell survives to the next timestamps, based on its neighbours
iv. Repeat this survival function(like step-iii) over all the cells in the universe neighbours.
v. Repeat steps iii-iv for the desired number of generations.

Installation:

To create conways game of life we are going to use, matplotlib and numpy arrays library. To install numpy and matplolib, use pip-

$pip install numpy, matplolib

Program to implement conways game of life:

Now it’s time to write program as per our above set of rules. Below is the program to implement game of life,

#Import required library

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import argparse
import time

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------
class Board(object):
   def __init__(self, size, seed = 'Random'):
      if seed == 'Random':
         self.state = np.random.randint(2, size = size)
      self.engine = Engine(self)
      self.iteration = 0
   def animate(self):
      i = self.iteration
      im = None
      plt.title("Conway's Game of Life")
      while True:
         if i == 0:
            plt.ion()
            im = plt.imshow(self.state, vmin = 0, vmax = 2, cmap = plt.cm.gray)
         else:
            im.set_data(self.state)
         i += 1
         self.engine.applyRules()
         print('Life Cycle: {} Birth: {} Survive: {}'.format(i, self.engine.nBirth, self.engine.nSurvive))
         plt.pause(0.01)
         yield self

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------

class Engine(object):
   def __init__(self, board):
      self.state = board.state
   def countNeighbors(self):
      state = self.state
      n = (state[0:-2,0:-2] + state[0:-2,1:-1] + state[0:-2,2:] +
          state[1:-1,0:-2] + state[1:-1,2:] + state[2:,0:-2] +
          state[2:,1:-1] + state[2:,2:])
      return n
   def applyRules(self):
      n = self.countNeighbors()
      state = self.state
      birth = (n == 3) & (state[1:-1,1:-1] == 0)
      survive = ((n == 2) | (n == 3)) & (state[1:-1,1:-1] == 1)
      state[...] = 0
      state[1:-1,1:-1][birth | survive] = 1
      nBirth = np.sum(birth)
      self.nBirth = nBirth
      nSurvive = np.sum(survive)
      self.nSurvive = nSurvive
   return state

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------

def main():
   ap = argparse.ArgumentParser(add_help = False) # Intilialize Argument Parser
   ap.add_argument('-h', '--height', help = 'Board Height', default = 256)
   ap.add_argument('-w', '--width', help = 'Board Width', default = 256)
   args = vars(ap.parse_args()) # Gather Arguments
   bHeight = int(args['height'])
   bWidth = int(args['width'])
   board = Board((bHeight,bWidth))
   for _ in board.animate():
      pass
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------

if __name__ == '__main__':
   main()

Output

Console:
Life Cycle: 1 Birth: 7166 Survive: 10621
Life Cycle: 2 Birth: 7930 Survive: 8409
Life Cycle: 3 Birth: 7574 Survive: 8756
Life Cycle: 4 Birth: 7114 Survive: 8406
Life Cycle: 5 Birth: 7005 Survive: 8126
Life Cycle: 6 Birth: 6644 Survive: 7926
Life Cycle: 7 Birth: 6266 Survive: 7711
Life Cycle: 8 Birth: 6132 Survive: 7427
Life Cycle: 9 Birth: 5957 Survive: 7322
Life Cycle: 10 Birth: 5769 Survive: 7290
Life Cycle: 11 Birth: 5585 Survive: 6937
Life Cycle: 12 Birth: 5381 Survive: 6791
Life Cycle: 13 Birth: 5208 Survive: 6686
Life Cycle: 14 Birth: 5063 Survive: 6563
….
…

Above results will be keep coming till we hit Ctrl-C in our terminal to stop program.

Graphical display:

Cells will keeps altering and will simulate very beautiful pattern.

You can change the above subplot by changing the settings and alter the slider value:

Updated on: 30-Jul-2019

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