A Short Game of Life

Posted by Steve Eddins, February 28, 2022

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I have written here, as well as in Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB, about using image processing operations to implement Conway's Game of Life. MATLAB creator Cleve Moler has written about the Game of Life several times (03-Sep-2012, 10-Sep-2012, 17-Sep-2012, and 08-Nov-2018) on Cleve's Corner. 

Recently, I saw a particularly concise implementation of the game. My MathWorks colleague, Christopher Creutzig, recently posted the following code snippet on a MathWorks company forum. These seven lines of code initialize a 750x750 game board, run the board through 500 generations, and save the result as an animated GIF file.

im = rand(750,750)>0.8;

for k=1:500

  t = conv2(im(:,:,k),[2,2,2;2,1,2;2,2,2],'same');

  im(:,:,1,k+1) = (t > 4) & (t < 8);

end

imwrite(~im,'life.gif','DelayTime',0,'LoopCount',1)

Matt McDonnell, a former MathWorks consultant, explored several short implementation techniques in his 19-Jan-2010 post on  Loren's Art of MATLAB. More good ideas can be found in the reader comments on that post.