Conway’s Game of Life
My Freshman year I started writing a python script to play Conway’s game of life. The game was created by British mathematician John Conway as a simple way to simulate life. The playing field is a grid of squares, where each square either holds a live cell or a dead one. The basic rules (taken from the wiki article) are as follows:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
If you want more information about the game itself and its significance, I’ll be posting another blog on the topic soon. I started this project by writing a quick python script that could output the game of life board as a nicely formatted array of 1s (living cells) and 0s (dead cells). After that, I turned the script into a class and made it possible to create Game of Life objects and to do lots more stuff with it. Here’s the current version of the script: The main function that is included will create a GOL object that is 10 cells by 10 cells. It will then add points at (0,0) and (1,1). Note: the grid works like pixels on the screen, it starts at (0,0) at the top left of the board. The script will output a 10 by 10 grid to the console. You are welcome to make any modifications and share the code as you wish, just give me credit.
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def main():
game = GOL(10)
game.addPoint(0,0)
game.addPoint(1,1)
game.run(1)
# while True: #does the same as run
# game.update()
# game.output(game.array)
# game.time.sleep(1)
## game.run()
pass
class GOL:
import time
import copy
def __init__(self, width): #The constructor for a GOL object. You only have to pass it width of the field
self.width = width
self.height = width
self.arraylength = width*width #The game of life field is all represented as one array, that gets truncated into the blocks you see when you print
self.array = [0]*self.arraylength #creates an array full of zeros that is the same length as arraylength
self.arrayNew = self.copy.copy(self.array) #uses the copy method of the copy class to copy the array into arrayNew
self.delay = 1 # This is how much time passes between
#hardcoded for now, creates a glider
self.array[self.index(3,3)]=1
self.array[self.index(4,3)]=1
self.array[self.index(5,3)]=1
self.array[self.index(5,2)]=1
self.array[self.index(4,1)]=1
def index(self, x,y):
fx = x%self.width
fy = y%self.height
return fy*self.width +fx
def toX(self,index):
return index%self.width
def toY(self,index):
return (index - self.toX(index))/self.width
def toXY(self, index): #returns x, y coordinate as a tuple (x,y)
return (self.toX(index), self.toY(index))
def addPoint(self, x,y): #adds a cell at the specified (x,y) location
self.array[self.index(x,y)] = 1
def changePoint(self, x, y): #changes the state of a cell at a specified (x,y) point
if self.array[self.index(x,y)] == 1:
self.array[self.index(x,y)] = 0
else:
self.array[self.index(x,y)] = 1
def update(self):
for i in xrange(self.arraylength):
fx = self.toX(i)
fy = self.toY(i)
if(self.numNeighbors(fx,fy)<2):
self.arrayNew[i] = 0
if(self.numNeighbors(fx,fy)>3):
self.arrayNew[i] = 0
if(self.numNeighbors(fx,fy)==3 ):
self.arrayNew[i] = 1
if(self.numNeighbors(fx,fy) == 2 and self.live(fx,fy)):
self.arrayNew[i] = 1
self.array = self.copy.copy(self.arrayNew)
def live(self, x, y): #returns true if a cell is alive
if (self.array[self.index(x,y)] == 1):
return True
else:
return False
pass
def numNeighbors(self, x, y): #Goes through the 8 possible neighbor positions and finds out how many of them are alive
res = 0
if (self.live(x-1,y)):
res+= 1
if (self.live(x+1,y)):
res+=1
if (self.live(x, y+1)):
res+=1
if (self.live(x,y-1)):
res+=1
if (self.live (x+1,y+1)):
res+=1
if (self.live (x-1,y-1)):
res+=1
if (self.live(x+1, y-1)):
res+=1
if (self.live(x-1, y+1)):
res+=1
return res
def output(self,foo):
for i in xrange(self.width):
print(foo[self.width*i:(i+1)*self.width-1]) #Prints out the array in rows of length width
print("________________")
def run(self, waitTime): #call this thing to have the game run. Pass a waitTime, which is the number of seconds between printouts
self.output(self.array)
self.update()
self.time.sleep(waitTime)
self.run(waitTime)
def runOnce(self, waitTime): #just like run, but only does it once
self.output(self.array)
self.update()
self.time.sleep(waitTime)
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()