{"id":5392,"date":"2022-02-28T15:11:57","date_gmt":"2022-02-28T20:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/?p=5392"},"modified":"2022-02-28T15:12:45","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T20:12:45","slug":"a-short-game-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/steve\/2022\/02\/28\/a-short-game-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Short Game of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I have written <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, as well as in <\/span>Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB<\/span><\/a>, about using image processing operations to implement <\/span>Conway's Game of Life<\/span><\/a>. MATLAB creator Cleve Moler has written about the Game of Life several times (<\/span>03-Sep-2012<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>10-Sep-2012<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>17-Sep-2012<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>08-Nov-2018<\/span><\/a>) on Cleve's Corner. <\/span><\/div>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.<\/span><\/div>im = rand(750,750)>0.8;<\/span><\/span><\/div>for <\/span>k=1:500<\/span><\/span><\/div>  t = conv2(im(:,:,k),[2,2,2;2,1,2;2,2,2],<\/span>'same'<\/span>);<\/span><\/span><\/div>  im(:,:,1,k+1) = (t > 4) & (t < 8);<\/span><\/span><\/div>end<\/span><\/span><\/div>imwrite(~im,<\/span>'life.gif'<\/span>,<\/span>'DelayTime'<\/span>,0,<\/span>'LoopCount'<\/span>,1)<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/div>Matt McDonnell, a former MathWorks consultant, explored several short implementation techniques in his <\/span>19-Jan-2010 post<\/span><\/a> on  Loren's Art of MATLAB. More good ideas can be found in the reader comments on that post.<\/span><\/div>Enjoy!<\/span><\/div><\/span><\/div><\/img><\/div><\/span><\/div><\/div>\r\n